Forest of Bliss

"Forest of Bliss" is a visual meditation on the rituals that make up life and death along the Ganges River of Benares, India. Robert Gardner created the film in 1985 while acting as director of The Film Study Center at Harvard University. Rejecting narration and dialogue translation, the film re-presents the "being" of a people and a culture.


"I have shaped the film so that it occupies the time between two sunrises. It stands as an exclusively visual statement about people being and also dying."
Robert Gardner

"Nominally an ethnographic study of funerary practices in Benares, it straddles ethnography, cinema vérité and experimental filmmaking."
Brian L. Frye (Senses of Cinema)

Screening: October 6th at 4pm - Columbia University

Conversation between Gardner and Ostor
The Film Study Center at Harvard University
Senses of Cinema