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Making Forest of Bliss: Intention, Circumstance, and Chance in Nonfiction Film. Robert Gardner and Akos Ostor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. 135 pp., DVD.
First released in 1985, Robert Gardner's 16mm nonfiction film Forest of Bliss is an unparalleled and controversial experiment in transcultural cinema. It has now been rereleased on DVD and incorporated into Making Forest of Bliss, the first in the Harvard Film Archive's new book series "Voices and Visions in Film." This is an extended conversation between the film's director Robert Gardner and its co-producer Akos Ostor, talking about issues of "intention, circumstance, and chance" surrounding the film's production, recorded as they sat around an editing flatbed, stopping and starting the film at will, inspecting and dissecting it. While reflections by filmmakers on their craft are ten to a dozen and part and parcel of the craft of filmmakers' self-fashioning-one thinks of John Grierson on Documentary, Nicholas Ray's I Was Interrupted, Trinh Minh-ha's Framer Framed, and Federico Fellini on Fellini-- there is really no precedent for this close reading of a work by its makers, containing as it does their later doubts and differences about the film's meaning and underlying anxiety about whether its spectators have been able to adequately apprehend their intentions.
In view of the vilification of Forest of Bliss throughout the pages of the Society for Visual Anthropology's periodical, SVA Review, in 1988 and 1989-surely the most egregious instance of a trahison des clercs in the history of visual anthropology-such enduring discomfiture about this film's reception that colors their conversation is quite understandable. In his elegant and enormously suggestive introduction, Stanley Cavell construes this disquiet as a "current of urgency," stemming from their desire to do for the film something analogous to what Walter Benjamin suggests translation provides a work of literature, to prepare its "afterlife."
An unanticipated revitalization of the genre of city symphony, in the tradition of Alberto Cavancanti's Rien que les heures, Walter Ruttman's Berlin, Joris Ivens' Rain, and Dziga Vertov's Man with the Movie Camera, Forest of Bliss is as aesthetically arresting as it is anthropologically accomplished. Dispensing altogether with voice-over narration and interviews and availing itself instead of complex strategies of editing and mise-en-scene, the film depicts the activities surrounding the disposal of...