Is Gardner’s Forest of Bliss (1986) an ethnographic film? Following the tripartite division of a film made by Banks (1992), which I used in the previous entry to analyse Gardner’s Dead Birds (1963) to identify where its ethnographicity resides, I argue that Forest of Bliss (1986) has not been immediately perceived as an (good) ethnographic film (Moore 1989, Parry 1989, Ruby 1989) because its ethnographicity does not reside in its intention, nor its event, neither in the reaction to watching the film. But where?
I said in my previous post that the use of images as ethnographic documents in Dead Birds and the narrative structure employed is what made me see that film’s resemblances with an ethnographic contemporary text. In Forest of Bliss, although the film is structured in a similar narrative manner, images are not explained, nor interpreted, nor really used to illustrate abstract concepts. Commentary is completely abandoned. It thus becomes harder to distinguish the way in which images are used or if they are used at all as ethnographic documents.
All images are documents of some sort in the end, but what makes them ethnographic documents though is the way in which the image-documents are used. Having said that, is there something ethnographic about Forest of Bliss? Peter Loizos (1992, 58) claims that ‘[i]t has simply been an error of judgement, and a category mistake, to treat this film as an ethnographic film gone wrong. It never tried to be one. The mistake is like mistaking a novel for a medical treatise, a racehorse for a work-horse, an orchid for a lettuce’.
But what if one imagines ethnography, following Stephen Tyler (1986, 125) as ‘a cooperatively evolved text consisting of fragments of discourse intended to evoke in the minds of both reader and writer an emergent fantasy of a possible world of common sense reality, and thus to provoke an aesthetic integration that will have a therapeutic effect’? What if ethnography ‘defamiliarizes common sense reality in a bracketed context of performance, evokes a fantasy whole abducted from fragments, and then returns participants to the world of common sense—transformed , renewed , and sacralized.’? (Tyler 1986, 126)
The film seems to do precisely this to a certain extent. As Parry (1989 , my emphasis) confesses, the film made him ‘re-live‘ something that he ‘experienced‘ in his first weeks of fieldwork: ‘scenes and events which I found both boringly protracted yet endlessly fascinating, occasionally somewhat distasteful and frequently of striking beauty – though above all the film evokes the intense frustration of initial incomprehension”. Loizos (1992, 58) also claims that the film’s ‘aim is to evoke thoughts in us by sounds and images, but not to tell us in formal conceptual terms what to think, or what to make of it’. The audience of Forest of Bliss, according to Crawford (1992, 77), is invited to ‘understand and sense other cultures by emphasising analog forms of representation open to interpretation’.
Forest of Bliss shows that what Tyler imagines ethnography, or more precisely post-modern ethnography to be can be achieved in film. But can it be achieved in writing? And would this particular post-modern ethnographic text be recognised as ethnography? If anthropologists found it hard to identify Forest of Bliss as a post-modern ethnography then it would be even hard to identify a textual version of Tyler’s post-modern ethnography as such. Anthropologists have been more at ease with identifying this film as art than as ethnography. Maybe this is the reason why the more experimental contemporary ethnographies have found their place in the art field rather than in anthropology. But, to quote Gardner’s response to the critique of Moore (1989), ‘I wonder if the time may not have come for members of certain orthodoxies in Anthropology to rethink their threadbare doctrines.’
References
Banks, M. 1992. Which films are ethnographic films? In Film as Ethnography, Crawford, P. I. and Turton, D. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Crawford, P. I. 1992. Film as discourse: the invention of anthropological realities. In Film as Ethnography, Crawford, P. I. and Turton, D. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Loizos, P. 1992. Admisible evidence? Film in anthropology. In Film as Ethnography, Crawford, P. I. and Turton, D. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Moore, A. 1989. The limitations of imagist documentary. A review of Robert Gardner’s Forest of Bliss‘. Society for Visual Anthropology Newsletter, V(1)
Parry, J. 1989. ‘Comment on Robert Gardner’s Forest of Bliss‘. Society for Visual Anthropology Newsletter, V(1)
Ruby, J. 1989. The emperor and his clothes. A commentary.’ Society for Visual Anthropology Newsletter, V(1)
Tyler, A. S. 1986. Post-modern ethnography. From document of the occult to occult document. In Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. (eds.). Berkeley: University of California Press.
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