TRANSCENDENT JOURNEY INTO A ‘FOREST OF BLISS’

A work of genius sometimes makes special demands. Robert Gardner’s “Forest of Bliss” (which opened Sunday at the Nuart for a week-long run) is an eccentric masterwork--but not in the sense of quirks or conscious obscurity. It’s a beautifully transparent film; its eccentricity lies in the purity and integrity of its approach.

Watching “Forest of Bliss,” we perceive what films usually avoid: a direct confrontation with reality, a rapt transcription of the visible world. Even more than that, we see the special poetry that breathes through reality’s every moment, a poetry the movie camera is uniquely equipped to capture.

Gardner is an ethnographic film maker, a documentarian in the tradition of Robert Flaherty. And, like Flaherty, he shapes images of reality to a private, lyrical agenda. “Forest of Bliss” records one typical day in the Indian holy city of Benares, from one sunrise to the next. It shows us burial rites and food markets, dogs gnawing on carcasses and priests communing with revenants, heaps of yellow flowers on the street and scum floating on the sun-burnished Ganges. It does so without explanation, without any non-indigenous music or narration and without a single subtitled translation of the (very) occasional dialogue.

It is as if we were set down there, invisibly, for that single day: observers of a world that seems at first impossibly exotic, which gradually becomes familiar enough to be touching, disgusting or lovely. Over and over, Gardner--who also photographed and edited “Forest”--achieves moments of transcendence, quiet little epiphanies of the everyday. “Forest of Bliss” contains only shots that are beautiful--like the dozen or so that would linger in your mind’s eye after films you admire. Not obtrusively beautiful, but quietly, serenely pure and exact. After this film--if you can adjust to the contemplative rhythms and refrain from demanding a “story”--you will know Benares in ways that will surprise you, know it as if in your bones.

OPTIONAL TRIM BEGINS (TO THE END)

Gardner supplies one frame of reference, an opening quote from William Butler Yeats: “Everything in the world is eater or eaten, the seed is food and the fire is eater.” That’s the opening: The film, according to its maker, is about being and dying. What we see are people eating, worshipping and dying, the rites of life and death, the dirt and broiling swelter of noon, the cupped night candles of the reverent. The three people we observe most are a “healer,” a priest and the Dom Raja (the local boss of the cremation grounds): respectively, a man who sells health, a man who sells hope and a man who sells sacred fire. Being and dying: The subject is a powerful one, and Gardner, by holding back, quietly observing and recording, proves himself worthy of it.

A caveat: Anyone who expects a normal narrative film--much less the disco-popping eyeball jolts that pass for a “mass movie” these days--will be pretty uncomfortable at “Forest of Bliss” (Times-rated: Family). It’s like a piece of strange music, a film you have to empty yourself for and relax into, one that should wash over you like waves of the river. If you do, it has great rewards. How many films give you a city, a people, the world between two sunrises and the poetry of flesh, flower and fire--of being and dying, decay and transcendence?

‘FOREST OF BLISS’ A presentation of the Film Study Center, Harvard University. Producers: Robert Gardner, Akos Ostor. Director/camera/editor Robert Gardner. Sound recording/2nd camera Ned Johnston. Sound editing Michel Chalufour.

Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

Times-rated: Family.