Gift of Circumstance David MacDougall

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  • REVIEW ARTICLE:GIFTS OF CIRCUMSTANCE

    Fig. 1. Robert Gardner. Photo: Ned Johnston, t

    Making Forest of Bliss: Intention, Circumstance amiChance in Nonfiction Film. A Conversation betweenRobert Gardner and Akos Ostor. Cambridge, Massa-chusetts and London: Harvard Film Archive, 2001.

    DAVID MACDOI GALLAustralian National University, Canberra

    Films, including many avowedly ethnographic films,are generally perceived as peripheral to anthropology,usctul pel haps as pedagogical or recording devices butnot challenging the discipline intellectually. There is, as

    well, a gap between the textual analysis of films andstudies of how films are received. Each approach hasits limitations. The former tends to dehistoricize tilms,focusing on their internal construction and assumingwider understandings for w hat are in fact the cultural andideological responses of particular critics. Receptionstudies, on the otherhand, may provide insights into howvarious kinds of viewers interpret films but tend todisconnect these from the authors' actual intentions.Even when films are placed in an historical context, they

    t All the images are copyrighted by the Film Study CenterHarvard University.

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  • are often interpreted within dualistic frameworks (ideal-ist/materialist, artistic/scientific, romantic/classical, re-alist/visionary) that oversimplify their motivations andthe realities of the creative process. These assessmentsfrequently measure films according to a specific visionof historical or ethnographic "truth," against whichthey must all too often be found wanting.

    What we have lacked, until recently, are commen-taries on the intellectual underpinnings and creativepaths by which films get made. Ethnographic filmmak-ers tend to write little about their work, perhapsbelieving that in the academic world this can only resultin an inevitable reduction, a substitution of words for theproducts of their labors. They may even feel a perversepleasure at foiling this process. "Making a film," saysJean Rouch, "is such a personal thing for me that the onlyimplicit techniques are the very techniques of cinema-tography. ... It is also very difficult for me to talk aboutit and, above all, write about it" (1985:32). Filmmakingoften consumes more energy than is apparent to outsid-ers, leaving little time for writing. Rouch has made overa hundred films but produced only a handful of articlesabout film itself. Different explanations could be givenfor the relative silence of other figures in ethnographicfilm, such as Robert Flaherty, John Marshall, TimothyAsch, and Ian Dunlop. It is not that filmmakers areunreflecti ve, for they are often quite talkative about theirwork, but the ideas, descriptions, and reflections theyexpress are ephemeral. This is the perspective mosteasily lost to history. What survives in writing is usuallyfragmented and anecdotal.

    If we had them, comprehensive, fine-grained ac-counts of the filmmaking process would more easilyallow viewers to compare their own constructions ofmeaning with an understanding of how particular intel-lectual agendas are pursued and developed in a work,within the historical context of its creation. They wouldallow one to see how a film had progressed through thephases of planning, production, and editing, and towitness the filmmaker's struggles to define issues,confront epistemological problems, and make anthropo-logical (and other) ideas and understandings manifest.Ideally, such an account would question the filmmakerand examine the work at every stage of its production,but in most cases this is impractical. Until we have morefull-length books by filmmakers, we will probably have

    to settle for less exhaustive testimonydiaries, produc-tion notes, interviews, and recorded conversations.

    Two years after its release in 1986, Robert Gardner'sfilm Forest of Bliss became something of a causecelebre through articles published in the pages of theSociety for Visual Anthropology Newsletter (an earlierincarnation of this journal). These included severalincontinent attacks on the film and on Gardner himself(Moore 1988, Parry 1988, Ruby 1989), followed laterby more temperate discussions (Ruby 1991, 2000,Loizos 1993, Kapur 1997). The attacks seemed to befuelled by a kind of corporate outrage, as if Gardner hadsomehow let the side down, or been guilty of insubor-dination. Several other articles appeared supporting thefilm (Staal 1989, Ostor 1989, Chopra 1989), one of themas splenetic as the original provocations (Carpenter1989).

    Since then much of the critical discussion of Forestof Bliss has revolved around the propriety of Gardnerproducing an interpretation of life (and death) in Benaresthat might reinforce the misconceptions of others. Thisbook may go some way toward explaining Gardner'sintentions and illuminating the film itself, but it will notdo much to satisfy his detractors. Many of their critiquescan in fact be read more as objections to Gardner' s worldview than as any actual fear of harm being done. Thefilm tends to divide its critics into those who have aviewof historical reality, or Benares, or India, oranthropologywhich the film offends and those who,perhaps even despite this, see value in such a radicallydifferent kind of film being made. Nonfiction filmmak-ing is inevitably a perilous business, for it takes the stuffof real human lives and transforms it. There are somewho see this as fundamentally immoral; yet it is also theprocess by which most of us observe the world aroundus and represent it to ourselves and others. One of theparadoxes of nonfiction film is that while we may denyit the possibility of objective truth (for it is always coded,always ideological), we somehow expect it to be "true"in its representations.

    Gardner chose to remain aloof from the debate,perhaps thinking of the discussion of the film that he andhis collaborator Akos Ostor had recently recorded in1987. That conversation has now been published by theHarvard Film Archive in an edition that includes for-wards by Gardner and Ostor, an appreciative introduc-

    David MacDougall is an ARC Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian NationalUniversity. He is currently completing a long-term video study of the Doon School in northern India.

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  • tion b\ Stanley Ca\ell. 153 images from the film, adetailed sliotlist, and not least of all, a DVD recording ofthe film in a pocket at tht back containing the entire filmwith the still images linked to it. In the text, the wordsof Gardner and Ostor are conveniently distinguished bydifferent typefaces. The exchanges between the two aredetailed and wide-ranging, filled with speculations, freshobservations, doubts, and questions. There is far moreof interest here to anyone curious about the filmmakingprocess than can be found in any number of criticalessays and film reviews. When the conversation flags,it is not for very long, and we can be sure that Gardnerand Ostor have edited out most of the longeurs andsolecisms, just as they have turned the transcript ofrecorded speech into brisk and readable prose. Noteventhese two, one suspects, ever spoke quite so conciselyor with so few false starts. Reading the book is likelistening in on some rather highly polished shoptalk.

    The 453 shots that make up the film are representedby 153 still images in color measuring about 6x8 centi-meters each, or approximately one image forevery threeshots in the film. The critical reader could be excusedfor wanting more picturesindeed a frame for everyshot in the film. Perhaps this was not possible, but thechoice of images does sometimes seem idiosyncratic,leaving some important sequences underrepresented.Perhaps the only way to put a positive gloss on this is tosee these as Gardner's choices, indicating his areas ofemphasis and reticence. But even if all the shots hadbeen represented, it would have been a curious exercise,for there would have remained the problem of choosingthe appropriate frame, and within some shots thechoicesare many. The choice presented here and on the DVDcould be viewed as a second opportunity for Gardner tore-imagine the film in a different medium some fifteenyears after it was made. Stills from one s own films arealways slightly disturbing monuments. Whatisit like tolook back upon your work and try to extract a handfulof images, which must inevitably be a pale reflection ofthe original? For the reader, Gardner s selection of theseimages has provided a useful aich memoirc, but for himit must have proved a tortuous kind of pleasure.

    We must be grateful to the publishers tor makingthe film available on DVD. a step that few distributorsot nontiction films have so far been willing to take,arguing that educational institution:-, (their chief market)do not have DVD players and do not buy DVDs. Butit distributors ot nontiction films do not make the films

    Fig. 2. Forest of Bliss film captures: nos.1,55,15,27

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  • Fig. 3. Fores^ofB//ssfilm captures. nos.24,116,138,143

    available, il is difficult to see how or why this couldchange. At % 100each (orthereabouts) DVD : laj ers arehardly the issue. Meanwhile, despiteexceptions likethisone, the truly awtul quality of VHS videotapes persists.

    During the course of the conversation, Gardnerlaments the tact that films over whose visual qualitiesthe makers have taken endless care are so often shownin degraded copies. There is in tact a disjunction in publicexpectations about fiction and nonfiction films, whennonfiction is so rarely seen on anything but a smalltelevision screen. It is part of the popular mythology ofnonfiction that it should be ugly and roufh, that thecamera eye should be imprecise, with no love or pa-tience for the things it seeseven to the extent ofsimulating a roughness in fictionalized documentarythat no nonfiction filmmaker would tolerate. All thesethings are of course anathema to Robert Gardner.

    Partly because of the controversy surrounding it.Forest of Bliss' has achieved a certain notoriety amongethnographic films. But the same was true of Dc idBirds (1963) before it, and several ot Gardner s intervening films. There is more than controversy imohed:the films announce themselves as deliberate and uncom-promising works, demanding to be taken seriousl}.They are not simply films 'about" something but theproducts of a distinctive and rigorous imagination.

    I am one of those who has no problem regardingForest of Bliss as an ethnographic film, not becauseGardner does (he is distrustful of the label) but becauseit seems to me to mark out new conceptual possibilitiesfor visual anthropology. Ethnography on filmthedescription of particular socio-cultural s\ stems andsettingsis open to a \ariety of strategies: illustrative,didactic, narrative, and associative. Gardner is one ofthe very few filmmakers who has attempted the last. Ibelieve it is useful to see the film as a prototype: anexperiment in a radical anthropological practice whichexplores the largely invisible interrelations of the\is-ible worldthrough \ isual (and it must be added, auditor,)means. Moreover, it seeks to do so in a fashion thatresembles the w a\ in which senson* aw aieness culturalmeaning, and metaphorical expression are combined insocial experience, and which film can evoke so elo-quently. As Gardner remarks at one point, "\\ c seemto comprehend the world in ways that the world itselfprovides lor its comprehension and metaphor is one ofthe tools at hand" (65). Forest of Bliss provides an al-ternative wa\ of thinking and feeline about the world.

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  • one which may strike some as familiar and others asutterly alien. It is a film that interprets reality by pro-viding, to use Susan Sontag's phrase, a "reality in thesecond degree."

    In 1957 Gardner wrote a statement about film andanthropology which could be taken as a paradigm for hislater career in filmmaking. "At least two characteristics,fundamental to all people, help distinguish human be-ings from every other manifestation of nature. The firstis the capacity for putting meaning into the realityapprehended by the senses The second characteristicis a capacity for being responsive to the meaningfulnessof each other's behavior, either of deed or of thought"(344-45). Forest of Bliss, and now this book, arechallenges to filmmakers and film viewers to be moreresponsive to the meaning-potential of everyday life.

    Gardner and Ostor's discussion returns often to theways in which objects in the film oscillate between theliteral and the metaphorical, and how they can beperceived as both. This is but one facet of theredoublement that lies at the heart of film itself, or anyrepresentation. But it is especially pertinent to film as anindexical medium, where one periodically has the senseof seeing through the images to the objects that occa-sioned them. Film, used with a sensitivity to thisconundrum, offers a unique approach to the ways inwhich the mind and the senses integrate cultural expe-rience. However one regards Gardner's particularBenares (and there are many others)whether onewould prefer a more "ethnographic" Benares, or aBenares more situated in contemporary Indian historyand politicsGardner's way of seeing social and cul-tural interconnections can still be productive for anthro-pology. But this way of seeing owes much to an oldertradition.

    In 1975 Jean Rouch wrote that it was to RobertFlaherty and Dziga Vertov "that we owe all of what weare trying to do today." He went on to quote Vertov, tothe effect that "it is not sufficient to present fragmentsof reality on the screen, to represent life by its crumbs.These fragments must be elaborated upon so as to makean integrated whole which is, in turn, the thematicreality" (1995: 82-83). It is hard to think of Forest ofBliss without also thinking of Vertov's Man With aMovie Camera (1928) and the cluster of "city sympho-nies" made between 1926 and 1930 by Walter Ruttman,Alberto Cavalcanti, Mikhail Kaufman, Jean Vigo, and

    Robert Siodmak. Gardner's film belongs to this tradi-tion in more ways than one. If ever a film were a "citysymphony," Forest of Bliss is one; and if ever a film wasthe work of one man with a movie camera, this filmcertainly is. Gardner is not interested in Vertov's self-reflexive gestures, pointing toward the materiality offilm, but he is interested in integrating fragments ofexperience into a thematic realitya "film truth" whichcan never be the truth of other methods.

    In Forest of Bliss, Gardner is committed to bringingus into a closer communion with wordless things andthe networks of associations, by no means fixed, thatmay surround them. (Jyotsna Kapur is right in stressingthe materiality, rather than the otherworldliness of thefilm.) He is resolute in refusing, with the exception ofone quotation from Yeats, to employ words or explana-tions, or to translate speech in subtitles, or in any otherway to "linguify" the film (to borrow Lucien Taylor'sexpression). This book, then, may serve as an antidotefor those who are made uncomfortable by the film, orwhat they see as a world made unnecessarily wordless.Gardner and Ostor remark at several points that if thespeech in the film had been translated we would not bemuch the wiserit is the emotional tone of the ex-changes that is important. In eschewing verbal explana-tions, Gardner credits viewers with a good deal moreintelligence and sensitivity to images and sounds thanmost other filmmakers would, and for an aficionado ofwords such as Gardner, this is significant. The filmbecomes a testament to seeing, but it is also intended asa challenge to our unthinking recourse to language as thefirst line of understanding. It is not that the film is sodifficult, Gardner seems to sayonly that we make it so.

    The conversation reported in this book proceeds asa kind of gentle interrogation of Gardner by Ostor. Ifthere is sometimes a sense of each feeding off theother's views, or of mutual congratulation, this isperhaps to be expected between colleagues and collabo-rators. And like the letters and diaries of writers andstatesmen, the conversation was probably never meantto be wholly private: posterity was always in mind, andpublication always a possibility. It is not unexpected thatthese two would see the film through the logic of itscreation, and this perspective is really the book's chiefraison d'etre. From their conversation one begins togain a sense of the knowledge and forethought aboutstructural and anthropological issues that underlie the

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  • film, but which the film itself wears lightly. Onediscovers that what some critics have seen as blind spots,such as political and ecological issues, were in factmatters of debate and conscious choice. The filmmakersare aware of the limits of what a film can hope to achieve.At the same time, the film's meanings are never regardedas exhausted, or exclusive of other views. The discus-sion is meant to be open-ended and a process of furtherdiscovery.

    Early in the conversation (and the film, because theyare working their way through it chronologically) Gardnerand Ostor refer to the scene of dogs fighting on the "farshore" of the Ganges. Gardner says that he had in mindan early warning to the audience that "the world is notthe best of all possible places to be; to survive there isgoing to be an awful lot of anguish to deal with, andsometimes you don't quite make it" (22).t Thinkingabout the possible responses to the film, Ostor remarks:

    I know that it disturbs people a great deal when theysee this scene the first time. I remember on thisoccasionand many others when we were filmingsuch scenesI was disturbed for reasons that I stillhave to puzzle out, and maybe in this conversationI will. While you were filming, I was really sensitiveabout the seemingly negative aspects of dogs, andyou remember we had a lot of discussion andarguments about filming the filth and the corpses, allthese matters that outrage the uninformed visitor.It's not that one wants to deny these things and playinto the hands of the superficial apologists for a"modern" India. Benares is not a hell-hole of deathand corruption, but if certain people see any evi-dence for some of these things they will assume thebasest motives for the images being included. (22-23)

    Ostor is modest about his role in the film, acknowl-edging that at times he could not visualize what it wouldlook like, but he is also frank in his disagreement whenthis matters, both on points of ethnographic detail andin his assessment of Gardner's aesthetic choices. Some-times he sounds less protective than Gardner of theviewer's sensibilities. This is the tone of one suchexchange:

    t Unless otherwise indicated, page numbers refer to thetext of Gardner and Ostor's conversation.

    RG: This is the first time that anyone actually seescremation, a discernible body being consumed bydiscernible flames. This is the only time in the filmthat the audience is asked to see this waypas-sively, I would say, since there is nothing beingasked of anyone except that they keep their eyesopen. I was very concerned when I was doing this,and I remember this part as the hardest part of thefilm to edit. The rest of the film, by comparison,really almost edited itself. That's obviously nottrue, but it felt that way because it had a remark-able feeling of inevitability to it. But this part wasvery problematic, very difficult, and I wasn't surewhat I should do. The whole Manikarnika episodein the film had to end in a way that resulted in someunderstanding and that also created some usefulmystery. I worked a long time to get it to satisfythese two requirements.

    AO: Well, I'm not sure. Here I find my self almostunequivocally on the other side, in the sense that itcould have gone on much longer. The fire somehowmakes it look more abstract. You weren't reticentabout the earlier glimpses of corpses in the river andso forth, which have a far more recognizable andcandid aspect. This body is somewhat screened bythe fire.

    RG: It has something to do with the obviousnessof what is happening. I mean, when you set fire tosomething that's combustible, it's going to burn up.That's not only pretty obvious, it is completelyunambiguous. But you are right about the possibilityof abstraction, the fire screening the body, and soforth. A lot depends on how the shot is made, whatthe camera does to the subject. I think I may nothave been too resourceful here. (106-107)

    Interestingly, it is often Gardner rather than Ostorwho alludes to the need for fidelity to ethnographicdetail, as when he includes the healer, Mithai Lai,blowing three times on a conch shell, where manyfilmmakers would cut coiners and show him blowing itonly once (50-51). The rhythms of actual life may herecome into conflict with the rhythms of the film, but forGardner the choice of which to observe is often a matterof respecting the dignity of a person, or the forms of

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  • Fig. 4. Photo: Ned Johnston.

    ^ ^

    Fg. 5. Gathering Sand on the Ganges, Benares, India. Photo: Ned Johnston.

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  • Fig. 6. Boatman on the Ganges, Benares, India. Photo: JaneTuckerman.

    Fig. 7. Photo: Robert Gardner.

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  • human invention, which may go deeper than we think.Later in the film a boat is being repaired, and rituals arebeing done for its "rebirth."

    When those hands are printed with yellow ochre onthe pavement ..., I actually show all five times ithappens. It would have been very easy to begin theshot with the third or fourth time it's done. It's a littlelike the three blowings of the conch at the beginningof the film. I think that five is an auspicious numberon an occasion like this, so, ethnographically speak-ing, there may be a reason for shooting and editingthe scene to include it all.... Nonfiction films,especially those made for commercial release, willnot usually give more consideration to the originalshape of the behavior than to the editorial require-ments of keeping the film moving. But my feelingon this is that if you ignore the internal rhythms ofthings, you stand to lose more than just authenticity.(87-88)

    Even without the subtitle of the bookIntention,Circumstance and Chance in Nonfiction Filmitwould be difficult to miss the prominence of this themein the text. Again and again, Gardner refers to thefilmmaker as the recipient rather than the bestower ofgifts. The leitmotif of luck keeps surfacing in the book,like the fresh-water Ganges dolphin that makes anunexpected appearanceone so slight that Gardner didnot see it until viewing the rushes. We are made aware,if we did not know already, how dependent the nonfic-tion filmmaker is upon chance and circumstance, and asa corollary, how often critics mistake chance andcircumstance for intention. And yet this is only half thestory, for the filmmaker makes his own luck throughpatience and observation and a talent for anticipation. "Iwould guess," Gardner says, "that one of the ways anargument might be made that this kind of filmmakinghas some art to it is to develop the idea of there being asensitivity to the way things unfold in actuality. Howmuch this is a talent and how much it is simply craftgained through long experience in observing life is hardto answer" (36-37).

    How then does luck becomes entangled in inten-tion? Nonfiction filmmakers do not simply wait foractuality to happen to them, for, as Dai Vaughan haspointed out, "film is about something, whereas reality isnot" (1991:21). On the evidence of Gardner's observa-

    tions, it is a matter of seizing the gifts that extend anddeepen one's own vision, and of respecting the world'senactments of itself. There was the moment whenGardner was filming the evening skyline and a monkeyjumped into the frame, onto the roof of the tallestbuilding. "How can such gifts of actuality be rejected?"To Gardner, "the monkey afforded a wonderfullysurrealistic comment on the whole urban panorama ...[as if] this world were being watched over by relativesof a lower order" (113).

    One sometimes has the experience while making anonfiction film that certain motifs recur uncannily indifferent combinations, as if they formed a thinly-covered network of underlying meaningsthe sorts ofmeanings that in fiction seem consciously devised.These may become apparent immediately or onlyemerge long after the film is finished. At these times theworld seems metaphorically charged, as if there existedonly a limited number of possible connections. Are suchexperiences simply reflections of the metaphors we liveby and perhaps look for, or do they correspond to deeperresonances in the structures of society? Clearly forGardner these are the taproots of his art.

    Much of the talk between Gardner and Ostor isabout the convergence of elements that Gardner haschosen to focus uponwater, wood, fire, boats, steps,marigolds, corpses, dogs, kites (as toys), kites (as birds),and so on. What astonishes Gardner as "luck," butwhich is objectively not really so astonishing, is whensome of these elements converge on their own, perhapsreinforcing the intimation of an underlying order thathas attracted him to Hinduism in the first place. In awholly constructed sequence, Gardner imagines a boy' skite pulling up the fire of the sun at dawn. He keeps onfilming kites as ambiguous symbols of childhood, flight,the spirit, the body, and so on. "There was also," he says(with an air of innocence), "some obscure feeling thatkites drifting off toward the far shore and sometimesfalling into the river had a larger meaning" (110). Hekeeps on filming kites, trying to film one falling into thewater. One evening he is filming a boat drifting out todeposit a child's body in the river, and there happens akind of magical event:

    Here, in the shot where the body is being droppedin the river, a kite falls in the background. So as thebody is put in, the kite joins it. You know, the wholething seems to get said in one quite simple symbolic

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  • passage that is. at the same time, powerfully actual.This was great luck, and someday we should askourselves what proportion of nonfiction film pro-ceeds from luck. (110)

    Hardly luck, one might suggest, but the other side ofcircumstance. For, as Gardner remarks at another point,"one of the few welcome accomplices of a nonfictionfilmmaker is accident. ...1 really think that putting

    bamboo-worker s yard, as often happeiu-d ' "No onewould have believed it was really happening ' saysGardner Or more to the point, ' i t would come oft assomething unquestionably contrived" (58). There is aparadox, then, about asserting, at one and the same time,consequence and seeming inconsequence. Here, Ostorgoes to the heart of the matter more directly thanGardner when he refers to what is left CM? of a film: "Itis symptomatic of the power to make things happen or

    Fig. 8. Boatman with Dead Child, Benares. Photo: Christo-pher James.

    oneself in the position toencounteraccident is very muchapart of succeeding in this genre" (60).

    The conflict implicit in finding meaning in therandomness of life when .so much of the film lestsupon such a processseems to be tested when suchfortuitous situations as the kite scene fall, as it were, intoGardner's lap. In that particular scene the relationshipof elements is so subtle and the accidental quality soevident, that the problem is muted. But what if onefilmed a body on a bamboo litter just as it passed by the

    make them not happen, and that s a\ s a lot about the \ enartificial crafting of these so-called real or actuality films.What is it that makes the 'realness of one scene moreor less acceptable than some other scene0' (58 lamnot very sure of the profundity of Gardner's reply: "1think part of the problem is that the \er\ act of filmingchanges the state ot realness in things.

    Later the issue returns when, as the newborn boatis taken to the river, a body is taken to be ceremoniallyimmersed. But once artifice has made its appearance, itcannot be conveniently suspended. 'Here is a eood c:isc

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  • of actuality outdoing artifice," says Gardner. "Neverthe-less, despite this sanction of reality, the inference mightbe drawn that the actuality is too contrived. I have notfelt it was a mistake to use this comparison, only that itfailed to be entirely convincing" (87).

    There is repeated speculation in the conversationabout how many of the connections and associationsintended in the film will come through to the audience.It is not a futile question, but nearly so without the bene-fit of reception studies (and these can rarely get at thesubtleties involved). There are so many audiences; andeach viewer will make a somewhat different set ofconscious and intuitive connections, some intended andsome not. One would really have to sound out manyviewers at length to discover a consensus on even onepoint. Filmmakers are understandably reluctant tocross-examine their audiences, but there is also acertain vanity involved. And conviction as well. Onemakes the film for its own sakeless as a message thanas a testament to what one has seen, and what one caresabout. Sometimes it is enough to know that theconnections are there in the body of the work, availableto those who may someday discover them.

    Doubts about viewers' responses are aired early inthe discussion, about the sounds of creaking oarlocksover indistinct shots of boats in the mist. This sound willrecur throughout the film, often evoking a boat thatremains unseen. Gardner seems uncharacteristicallytentative at this stage: "I don't think anybody justlooking at this scene in the early morning mist wouldknow what is gliding by, but the sound of the oars tellseveryone water is involved. ... I have a feeling that atsome level it is working" (19). Not long after this thereis a shot of the holy fire at Manikarnika ghat. Ostor sayshe associates the fire with steps, which are to become animportant thematic element in the film. "I associate thesteps with the fire," he says. "Well," Gardner replies,"maybe you can, but maybe nobody else can." Whatis curious here is that neither of them, here or elsewherein the conversation, thinks in terms of a second orsubsequent viewing of the film. It is always as thoughthe film will be seen once, and only once. Is this just hardrealism, or a misapprehension among filmmakers? Oris it simply that they are impatient for the film to deli-ver everything of itself on the first viewing?

    By the time the discussion is a little further ad-vanced, Gardner sounds more confident. Perhaps it isbecause here the elements of the film are being assembled

    more bluntly. There are vultures wheeling overhead anda shot of an "unmistakable" corpse in the water. "Splicedtogether they're making the usual A + B = C," saysGardner, as though reciting a bit of Eisensteinian alge-bra. There's also a barge full of wood being rowedupriver. "It is not just for keeping people warm at night.I would hope all this is fairly clear from the editing" (48).

    A little later, Gardner again sounds a despairingnote. The stairs above the ghat are a recurrent image inthe film, and we have now moved inside the MuktiBhavan, a charity-run hospice for the dying, and arelooking up a staircase. Gardner says that while he wasshooting this he was thinking of stairs in association withthe transitions of life and death. But is there any pointin all this?

    The question I would like answered is when or evenwhether, with all the intentionality in the worldputting as much metaphorical spin on the images asI or anyone else can manage, the audience is evergoing to know that they are being asked to look atthe stairs in this movie in a way they haven't thoughtto look at such things before. I think they will bewilling to admit to a certain bombardment of theirsenses, but the question remains whether and howmuch they are focusing on the idea of stairs havingmore than just architectural significance. (61-62)

    The issue is never resolved in the conversation, butit is clarified at one point when Gardner concedes thatthe filmmaker's conscious linking of ideas and objectsmay never rise to the level of cognition in the viewer,and perhaps this is just as well. "We are being veryprecise about our associations. The average viewerwon't be. He or she will just undergo, at best, somestrong but quite inarticulate feelings" (65). This is theminimalist view, from which he can take some comfort,but it is not of course entirely true, nor expected to be.Even the "average" viewer (whoever that is) will under-stand some of the metaphors of this film at a cognitivelevel (the corpse-bearing litter as ladder, perhaps; or thekite as spirit). The more important lesson here is that anexplication du texte is not what any filmmaker is after.Despite a great deal of effort organizing a film, much ofits power as a source of understanding necessarily worksat the level of feelings and ambiguous possibilities. If onewants the viewers to live the film, it is counterproductiveto encourage them constantly to decode it. Moreover (in

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  • Gardner's view) explanation can easily displace othermodes of understanding. Givenanexplanation, viewers-"will no longer need to pay quite the same kind ofattention" (1 14). The problem one sometimes encoun-ters of intellectuals who are unable to "see" a fi Im is thatthey are too busy trying to think what they are supposedto be thinking about it. The consequence, of course, isthat they are then likely to conclude that the film has"'no" meaning or is 'incomprehensible.

    In what Gardner regards as a highly pregnantsequence, a boy is seen trying to launch his kite in theair rising from the cremation ground, with a scale forweighing wood in the foreground. This is followed bya shot of an important Hindu shrine, with sparrowspecking at the offerings. Gardner observes: i don'tknow whether the audience sees these connections. I.would be content if they merely registered the facts:fires, scales, boys, kites, thermals. I'm confident theywould then, at some level of their imagination, workouttheir meaning" (83).

    Gardner's obsession with metaphor only becomesunsettling when it seems to afflict him with the sort ofinterpretive tunnel-vision that he would find excessivein others. He confesses to not knowing why he feltcompelled to include shots of sand being loaded on the"far shore" and unloaded in Benares. But then he seemsto feel obliged to explain this as his response to the "ant-like" dreariness of human labor, or to time itself (sandrunning through an hourglass). But people are not antsby choice. Gardner seems a little too inclined here to turneverything in the world metaphorically to his purpose,even the need of human beings to make a living, or todig sand for the cement to build their city. It is adetachment that sits uneasily with his more intimatemoments of sympathy for human beings and their lot.

    This sympathy expresses itself in a restraint thatsome may find hard to follow or mistake for coolness.Most nonfiction filmmakers have few misgivings aboutmaking films about other peopleindeed, it is in film-ing them that they find an endless fascination. But forGardner this is presumptuous in the extreme. 'The veryidea of finding a way to reproduce some reality that canbe called another person is, on its face, a total absurdity"(99). His portrayals of individuals aie therefore circ um-spectand, above all, respectful of what James Agee oncecalled "the immeasurable weight in actual existence ofanother human being (Agee & Fvans 1960: 12). In hisconversation with Ostor, Gardner keeps circling around

    .-

    Fig. 9. The Dom Raja, King of the Cremation Grounds,Benares. Photo: Ned Johnston.

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  • Fig. 10. HealeratDurga Temple, Benares. Photo: JaneTuckerman.

    Fig. 11. A Brahmin Priest Woshipping at his Shrine near the Ganges. Photo: Jane Tukerman.

    80 Volume 17 Number 1 Spring-Summer 2001 Visual Anthropology Review

  • the problem of human dignity, never quite knowing howto find its center, except perhaps by indirection. Al-though there are three main "characters" in the filmthe healer, the priest, and the Dom Rajaeach main-tains a mystery and autonomy that the film seemsreluctant to invade.

    Gardner makes it clear that none of these personsis being developed "as a character in the familiar,narrative sense" (49). The one to whom he seemsclosest in an oddly companionable way is the old healerMithai Lai, perhaps the most mysterious of the three.There is no clearly discernible core to this character,perhaps because so much of his stock in trade ismystification. To Gardner, there are no obvious rulesfor respecting someone's dignity: one must assess eachinstance separately. Sometimes the result iscounterintuitive. In the midst of aritual, Mithai Lai givesa great belch. "I didn't really hesitate to include thatwhen editing. Why hasn't it diminished his dignity?Could it have anything to do with the way it was shot?The way it was graphically delivered? That there is acontext already provided within which to deal with thisevent?" (51). All of the above, no doubt, but alsobecause there has been no attempt to recruit Mithai Laito a moral position within the classical structures ofcharacter-narration. Within such a universe there can beno real embarrassment. Perhaps that is the differencebetween filmmaking that strives to preserve good man-ners and Gardner's relative indifference to them. As hesays at another point, it is amazing that fiction filmswhich strain to achieve realism "never show anything asordinary or as innocent as someone taking a pee" (41).

    Fundamental to Gardner as a filmmaker is his desireto forge a closer relation with the physical world throughthe camera's almost prehensile vision. One is remindedof Barthes' notion of the punctum in photographs andhis attention to the erotics of language. It could as easilybe Gardner as Vertov, saying, "I am the 'cine-eye,' themechanical eye; I am the machine that will show you theworld as only the machine can see it. Henceforth I shallbe liberated from human immobility" (Rouch 1995:82).For Gardner's camera is everywhere, climbing stairs,sweeping along laneway s, stopping to glance at a child'sbroken kite on the ground, or a marigold, or a pile ofrefuse. There is a sense of urgency to Gardner's filming,in both its movement and moments of stillness, as if toolittle time remained to see the world with a clear eye.This way of seeing is strongly sensory, made all the more

    immediate by Gardner's refusal to allow us to see itthrough the screens of information or narrative. Thesubjectivity involved is explicitly his own, but it comesto us with a startling intimacy.

    In Gardner and Ostor's discussion, the erotics andhaptics of filming tend to get covered over by the talk ofmeanings and connections. Occasionally, however, theconversation alludes to the more visceral aspects ofbodily experience, including bodily functions. Gardnerremembers the morning when he had to avoid steppingin piles of human excrement on the steps above the river,and of finally resolving his feelings of aversion byincluding this in the film. About this he remains a littleironic, referring to matter "of suspiciously human origin"as if less comfortable with naming it than seeing it. Thisdiffidence surfaces unevenly throughout the book, inboth the choice of words and still frames. There areshots later on of a man defecating on the steps, andanother relieving himself in the gutter, both passed overfairly casually as matters of "innocence" and indiffer-ence.

    About shots of human corpses Gardner and Ostorare forthright, and perhaps naturally so since this wasbound to be an issue among viewers. We have alreadynoted their discussion of the cremation sequence. Al-though explicit shots of corpses are rare in the film, thebook includes the relevant still frames of these, withGardner and Ostor discussing how they are likely to bereceived. Of one shot quite early in the filmof a water-whitened body being chewed by a dogGardner sayshe is "a little astonished when people don't know whatit is" (34). They are more offhand about another shot,perhaps from having discussed it many times beforea body in the water, anus up, preceded by a shot ofcircling vultures. At one level they seem to assume weknow (or choose not to point out) that vultures beginconsuming a body through its orifices.

    Although the possibility of disgust (at violence tobodies, and excretion) is given some attention, thepossibility of visual pleasure is treated more tentatively.Much of Gardner's interest in filmmaking clearly lies inits potential for empathetic and corporeal involvementin the world, but this is more difficult to talk about thanits literary aspects. He obviously takes pleasure incertain sensory qualities intrinsic to the filmits sounds,its moments of tranquility, the form and details of certainrituals. At one point he speaks of the comparatively raremoments (ten, he estimates, during the whole time in

    Visual Anthropology Review Volume 17 Number 1 Spring-Summer 2001 81

  • Fig. 12. Corpse going to Cremation Ground. Photo: Jane Tuckerman.

    Benares) when he sees something unfolding through theviewfinder with a kind of wonderfor example, whenthe Dom Raja is waking from his sleep. On thoseoccasions 'you're at the height of your power, at theheightofyourecstasy asafilmmaker,"hesays(37). Thebook is more reticent about other empathies, such as thesensualityperhaps in sheer relief from the dissolutionof other human bodiesof the healthy boatman rowingthe wood barge upstream. This involves several ex-tended sequences, but they are mentioned only briefly,and there are no still frames to represent them.

    Several still frames in the book allude to shots of arather more formal pictorial composition, such as a hugerising sun, and boats with sails at dawn and dusk, filmedwithtelephoto lenses from the' far shore." For me,theserepresent the only aesthetic slippages in the filmGardner's occasional weakness for the conventionallybeautiful image, in place ot the distinctive character ofhis other shots. When speaking of these rather dieamyimages, he has a tendency to invoke classical and literal y

    parallels, whence one reaches the final image of arowboat in the mist, grainy like a pointillist painting,suggesting the crossing of the river St\ \ .

    In contrast to its silence on some of these matters,the book regularly takes up questions of structure andrhetoric. Gardner notes the arrival of the discussion atvarious crucial junctures: the end of the introductorysection of eleven shots; the end of the "initial phase ofthe film, w ith the return of Mithai Lai to his house: thepoint "'two-thirds of the vva\ into the film' when thewood barge docks, and so on. The idea of structuringthe film around a single fictive day is presented as centralto the film's conception trom early on. Thereafter, threeforward structures are interwo\ enthe progress of theday, from dawn to dawn, the movement of bodies fromthe inner parts of the city to the river, and the gradualconvergence of symbolic objects. Gardner notes theway in which motifs that are 'planted" at an earlierstatic such as the sound and si sht of wood being cut anddelivered, or the making of the bamboo "Madders,

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  • gradually reveal their fuller significance, resulting in asense of unfolding. One is reminded here of Flaherty' stechnique of presenting a series of details that graduallyresolve themselves into a wholewith a sense, for theaudience, of discovery.

    At one point Gardner and Ostor discuss the moregeneral convergence over the length of the film of itschosen objects. Gardner has spoken earlier of thedifficulty of approaching "complexity as complexity,"since this almost invariably requires some sort of verbalexegesis (45). It is also potentially bewildering for thefilmmaker, who may end up simply filming unenlighten-ing "grand confusion" (85). Instead he has chosen tostart with the detailed observation of "ordinary reali-ties"dogs, wood, kites, marigolds, etc.trusting thattheir interrelationships can be gradually developed. Andso we come to the sequence in which woodworkers arebusy splitting pieces of wood and weighing them on ascale. The sequence brings together the stairs, the wood,the scales, the dogs, the boats, and the river. Here, asOstor observes, these elements become "incrediblycharged." Gardner then points to the two kinds of"layering" that can occur at such moments. In additionto the convergence of elements, forming a complex inwhich they are interrelated, each element can be layered"as to the significance or meaning of its content" (73).In other words, there can be an "optical" layering, wherewe see the elements connected, and a symbolic layeringin which each element takes on multiple meanings fromits associations in different contexts. We get an insighthere into Gardner's strategy for creating a narrative ofideas and associations. The film gains much of itsforward motion from a gathering comprehension of thelarger structure.

    The dynamics of this narrative also involve a gradualincrease in the pace, scope, and directionality of the filmas more and more bodies are brought toward the river:a "stream of death going down toward Manikarnika"(91). At Manikarnika, the burning ghat, the film reachesits dramatic climax, after which Gardner acknowledgeshe faced a difficult transition. "The editing problem wasto find a way to get out of this powerful place" (108).One of the rhetorical features of the film is its shifts ofmood from intensity to relaxation, and from "metaphori-cally loaded" to "realist" or observational modes ofexpression. These changes seem to propel the filmforward, as though releasing and storing up energy, thenspringing forward in a new way. Ostor comments that

    it is surprising to him that the film can encompass severalradically different filmmaking styles. "It shows up thefutility of legislating for filmsaying what it should orhas to dobecause here an allegorical, even abstract,sequence is followed by real time without any conflict,the film form accommodating both" (34). Gardnerconfesses that it is hard for him to put himself in otherpeople's heads, but like any filmmaker he tries to attunehimself to a hypothetical viewer's sensibilities. Afterthe audience has "had to work pretty hard" he tries togive them a respite, a chance to find their feet andreorient themselves. His remarks on placing the firstmarigold sequence give a sense of this method, and alsoof the tension between the film's rhetorical and devel-opmental requirements.

    Of course, the placement of this marigold passagehere, after the Mithai Lai sequence, is to some extentarbitrary. I actually think it was done partly for thesake of the light in that I was trying to sustain thenotion of a day passing; but I also put it here becauseI wanted another quiet passage before getting sweptaway by the din and clatter of Benares. (47)

    There is the suggestion here of an analogy betweenmusical and filmic construction, although music is neverexplicitly mentioned as a model. However, Forest ofBliss would have to be one of the most musicallyconstructed films of the 1980s, with its movements,recurring motifs, and fugue-like overlapping of actions.Gardner refers to preludes and rhythms and tempo andmelody. Discussing the last shot before nightfall, he says"I did feel that there should be a pause before the filmwent into its final sequences" (113), much as a composermight speak of a pause before the final return of the maintheme. Possibly even more musical in feeling is the oneinstance of slow motion cinematographygirls seenplaying hopscotcha characteristic Gardner touch.

    Even if not in formal terms, the film could be judgedmusical for its uses of ambient music, ritualized speechand chanting, bells, and natural sounds. The sound ofcreaking oarlocks is heard long before oars are actuallyseen, and this is the most important sound in the film, towhich it keeps returning. Gardner notes that after a dayof filming tree-felling in the forest, all he wanted to usewas the sound of it (25). At four points at least, mentionis made of the "enhancement" during editing of existingsounds, which Gardner regards as a way of correcting for

    Visual Anthropology Review Volume 17 Number 1 Spring-Summer 2001 83

  • the inadequacies of location recording. Mithai Lai'sgrunting as he goes up and down the steps refers not onlyto the effort and discomfort of an old man, but also tothe steps themselves, which will become prominent inthe film. Later, the sound ofadonkey's dead body beingdragged down the steps is also enhanced, and entirelynew sound is created for the tapping of a blind man'sstaff (68). Gardner often uses sound to evoke imagesthat would be less expressive if actually seen, or to createthe sense of a larger world off-screen. Here, as always,he is as much concerned with the viewer's imaginativecontribution to the film as with what he himself canshow.

    The book engages its readers in much the sameway, although at a different level. The shot-by-shotapproach, interlaced with the images, gives it a specialfreshness and utility. In following the contours of thefilm, it also reveals the contours of a particular set ofassumptions about it. As the discussion mediates be-tween these and our own responses to the film, itconstantly invites our rejoinders and interventions. Thebook thus functions differently from most of the avail-able literature on ethnographic film. It is neither aconventional study guide nor a postproduction scriptwith appended essays, such as the one for Dead Birdsedited by Karl Heider some years ago (1972), or thespecial edition of Studies in Visual Communicationdevoted to Rouch and Morin' s Chronique d 'un ete (Feld1985). It allows us to witness how memory andconversation bring to the surface ideas and intuitionscrucial to a film's construction. In their conversationGardner and Ostor seem to rediscover the film and, asthey talk, come to understand it more deeply.

    For admirers of Forest of Bliss, the book offers arich resource for further thinking about the filmas wellas the benefit of having the film itself on DVD. For thoseinterested in how films are made, it provides an absorb-ing first-person account of how the initial, often intuitiveconception of a film takes on flesh and gradually evolvesthrough the practicalities,accidents, and constant refor-mulations of practice. Filmmakers will find much herethat is recognizable, and perhaps be stimulated to newways of thinking about their work. In an era in whichnonfiction filmmaking is dominated by talking heads andthe informational bias of television journalism, the bookis particularly valuable for its excursions into the meta-phorical uses of sound and image. It may even come asa revelation to some that films about social and cultural

    institutions can take paths so different from those ofsocial and political science, and depart so radically fromthe structures of expository prose.

    REFERENCES

    Agee, James and Walker Evans1960 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. 2nd ed. Boston:

    Houghton Mifflin.Carpenter, Edmund1989 Assassins and Cannibals, or I Got Me a Small Mind

    and I Means to Use It. Society for Visual Anthro-pology Newsletter, 5(1): 12-13.

    Chopra, Radhika1989 Robert Gardner's Forest of BlissA Review.

    Society for Visual Anthropology Newsletter 5(1): 2-3.

    Feld, Steven (ed.)1985 "Chronicle of a Summer." Studies in Visual

    Communication 11(1).Gardner, Robert1957 Anthropology and Film. Daedalus 86: 344-52.Heider, Karl (ed.)1972 The Dani of West Irian: An Ethnographic Com-

    panion to the film Dead Birds. Warner ModularPublications.

    Kapur, Jyotsna1997 The Art of Ethnographic Film and the Politics of

    Protesting Modernity: Robert Gardner's Forest ofBliss. Visual Anthropology 9: 167-185.

    Loizos, Peter1993 Robert Gardner in Tahiti, or the rejection of

    realism. In Innovation in Ethnographic Film: FromInnocence to Self Consciousness 1955-1989.Manchester University Press, 139-168.

    Moore, Alexander1988 The Limitations of Imagist Documentary. Society

    for Visual Anthropology Newsletter 4(2): 1-3.Ostor, Akos1989 Is That All that Forest of Bliss is About? Society

    for Visual Anthropology Newsletter 5(1): 4-9.Parry, Jonathan1988 Comment on Robert Gardner's "Forest of Bliss."

    Society for Visual Anthropology Newsletter 4(2): 4-7.

    Rouch, Jean1985 The Cinema of the Future? Studies in Visual

    84 Volume 17 Number 1 Spring-Summer 2001 Visual Anthropology Review

  • Communication 11(1): 30-35.1995 [1975] The Camera and Man. In Principles of

    Visual Anthropology, Paul Hockings, ed. 2'd edi-tion. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Ruby, Jay1989 The Emperor and His Clothes. Society for Visual

    Anthropology Newsletter 5( 1): 9-11.1991 An Anthropological Critique of the Filmsof Robert

    Gardner. Journal of Film and Video 43(4): 3-17.2000 Robert Gardner and Anthropological Cinema. //;

    Picturing Culture. Explorations of Filmand Anthropology. University of Chicago Press 15-113

    Staal, Frits1989 Anthropologists AgainstDeath. Society for Visual

    Anthropology Newsletter 5( 1). 2-3.Vaughan, Dai1999 The Space Between Shots. In For Documentary.

    Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 9-28.

    Fig. 13. A Boatman on the Ganges. Photo: Ned Johnston.

    Visual Anthropology Review Volume 17 Number 1 Spring-Summer 2001 85