Robert Gardner: Forest of Bliss

Robert Gardner's masterly film about Varanasi in India, Forest of Bliss (1986), does not need to be improved in any way, but with no commentary or score, it can be augmented without permanently affecting the pristine original. Gardner may have been an outsider, a visitor to Varanasi, but Forest of Bliss shares the same meditative, low-key style of Sleep Furiously. He can afford to be low-key because Varanasi is one of the most intense, visually intoxicating, delirium-inducing places on Earth. While sparing us none of the city's routine unpleasantness – a bloated corpse floating in the river, shit everywhere – the film is full of spellbinding images of the Ganges bathed in mist and of the burning ghat at Manikarnika. Baraka and Powaqqatsi both drop by or zoom in on Varanasi; Gardner offers a lingering, almost homely view of the day-to-day sacred divinity as resident landlord and (sometimes noisy) neighbour. The tacit message, in Hindi (rather than Hopi) might be "Way of life that never changes."


Robert Gardner in Mexico.


"Forest Of Bliss" Ecovillage Varanasi India