Robert Gardner's "Forest of Bliss"

MoMA's blurb for this film quotes Seamus Heaney -- well, it quotes "Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney" -- to telegraph the particular sort of awe expected of us:

“When Ezra Pound commended the natural object as the adequate symbol, he might have been thinking about Forest of Bliss. Robert Gardner transmits the sensation of the deep and literate gaze, and does so with an intensity that passes from the documentary into the visionary.”

In other words this is the kind of documentary that Robert J. Flaherty was making 70 and 80 years ago (Nanook of the North, Man of Aran), the kind that offers to get us in touch with Deep Reality by spending some unmediated time with Real People pursuing ancient ways of living.

But your time is not unmediated at all. You think it is at first, because there is no narrator and no one seems to be talking to the camera. But in Gardner just as much as in the much-debunked Flaherty, this is only a pose of diffidence. In fact, the directors show only careful selections from the broad reality they claim to present (Benares in this film, Ireland and "the North" in Flaherty's), and they weave those selections into a design that is really a work of their own imagination.

Gardner's design is about cycles, and it begins with a quotation from Yeats (who else?) that tells us what to think about them. In the film, people live and then they die -- see, a cycle. And their bodies are thrown into the river (no, really) and soon eaten by dogs. See? A cycle. Since there is no narrator to say it again and again, "cycle" is emphasized by reiterating motifs. Did you notice those dogs eating the corpse? Well, here are some other dogs eating another corpse. Oh, and have you seen the broad expanse of river lately? Let's take another look. Every boat that rows out onto the river is accompanied by the exact same squeak-squeak of the oars in the oarlocks. Those with less Depth than a Nobel laureate might call this repetitive and might question why every oarlock in town produces the same squeak, but you're missing the point. It's a way of expressing the cycles that life is all about.

I remember reading one expostulation about Man of Aran to the effect that Flaherty was falsifying by editing out his subjects' religious expresssions. Gardner falsifies in the other direction: for his subjects, religious expression is all there is. Who built the large buildings they skitter around? Who grew, tended, and cut the trees whose sorry scraps we must see again and again? Where are the police and tax collectors?

Call this film a poem and I would say OK, but don't call it a documentary. Call the dogs and corpses and gnarly logs an adequate symbol, and you have certainly told the truth, because any child can see what they symbolized; but Ezra Pound it ain't.