The complex, detached editing of Forest of Bliss highlights the presence of cyclical forces and death rituals in Benares (dead bodies cast away into fire or water). Through repetition and opposition, the intersection of motifs and the concurrence of layers of image and sound, the strange slowly turns familiar with each rhyme. Some 25 years later, Robert Fenz revisited the places where Gardner shot this and other films. Although the locations and some of those portrayed correspond to those in Gardner’s film, Fenz’s is, above all, an invocation and an evocation of an absent presence, that of Gardner in that great labyrinth which flows into the Ganges. Each location is framed by winter in Cambridge MA prior to the journeys. Through the windows of one or both, the filmmakers comprehend each other, enter in correspondence.