Forest of Bliss

Before:
Our trip to Africa
Peter Kubelka. AT, 1966, 16mm, color, 13 min

Ninety minutes of everyday life, life and death in Banáras, the "Forest of Bliss", the holiest place in India, the city of Shiva and the "Great Cremation Ground". Ninety minutes of a flood of irritating, wonderful, terrible and alien images, interrupted by no explanation, no comment, no explanatory word. The eye remains alone, exposed to what it sees and what the film's jumps in space and time compression make visible. The cycles of wood, water and marigolds in the city of death, where everything seems sacred and profane at the same time. Business and rite includes death, dying, corpses and cremation fires at Manikarniká Ghat. Reality as a beguiling and terrible dream, in whose unknown labyrinth no tour guide can provide reassurance. Dogs, rubbish, flowers, sand, dead wood, stairs - the things of reality as signs, symbols, abyss and refusal. The language of the speechless. Forest of Bliss is completely unparalleled, and not just in “ethnological films”. (Harry Tomicek)

Before it is a major work by Peter Kubelka, who was supposed to document an Austrian tour group's African safari on film, but then allows the recorded images and sounds to collide in a subersive way.

Photo: Austrian Film Museum