Word: blisse
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...Fever, by contrast, there are depths beneath the glittering surface. Harris and a gifted supporting cast manage to suggest most of them despite Director Brian Murray's heavy-handed style, which emphasizes pandemonium rather than character study. The slender plot depicts the artsy Bliss family at play in their country home. Their main amusement is the calculated tormenting of four hapless weekend visitors, each of whom winds up enmeshed by some member of the family in a less than blissful, indeed heartlessly feigned, romance...
Forest of Bliss, a portrait of the holy Hindu city of Benares, India, is the brainchild of Harvard film professor Robert Gardner, considered by many to be the most important anthropological filmmakers of our time. The documentary has no subtitles, no musical soundtrack, no voice-over commentary--only the insistent din of a city at work, a city whose main function concerns the burial of the dead...
Although Gardner filmed Forest of Bliss over a 10-week span (concealing his camera in a green garbage bag so as not to attract the curious masses), he compressed his shots into a single day's medley, sunrise to exquisite sunrise. During the moments after the opening sunrise, we feel baffled, in need of explication. When the sun rises once again, we have experienced what Gardner refers to as "it" and we begin to understand...
This weakness, however, is counterbalanced by Gardner's brilliant application of the cinema verite technique. Forest of Bliss lays bare a Benares we would see and experience had we been there. We are bombarded by sights and sounds: street noise, the silence of the river, the knelling of bells. We are tourists experiencing Gardner's "it," his ineffable sense of place and not an audience simply being led about like a dog on a leash. Forest of Bliss hangs before us nakedly exposed and uninhibited, without the protective cover of explication...
...what exactly is Gardener's "it"? The movie's subtle texture, effortlessly impelled by Gardener's deft editing, reveals that "it" is the sense of death that pervades daily life. Like cinema verite, "it" is based on an oxymoron. Forest of Bliss actually reasserts life by concentrating on the ceremony of dying. Vitality and color, charisma and charm, abound in the visages of the living inhabitants, most notably the fire seller, whose joie de vivre consumes the screen. And this juxtaposition of life with death necessitates audience observation, not verbal explanation...