having just seen James Broughton's 'The Gardener of Eden', it makes me wonder what kind of person he was in his daily life. but the question is a rhetorical one, because The Gardener of Eden makes it all very clear: he must have been a great nature-loving movie director, and a peaceful one too. what The Gardener of Eden asks of us, is to question the idea of men coming from nature of from a higher super being. the nice thing about this short experimental movie, is that it doesn't give us any straight answers: it shows us nature and her population has possibly been created by nature as well as by a divine being. are we children of a god, or the results of millions of years (r)evolution?
2 Reviews
welcome to the garden, welcome to the dance
theatrum-114 October 2006
The Gardener of Eden is a short avant-garde movie by James Broughton (who has filmed it on Sri Lanka in 1981) with one main actor (Bevis Bawa) and many shots on flowers and on a few faces of young or mature men. This short has no clear plot but it has great atmosphere of long mythological concept awaken by the figure of "Gardener of Eden" who takes care about the flowers and plants in the garden of the life. The movie is based on a combination of shoots on old man's face or body and on the various flowers, trees, leaves and blows and on some male faces. There is also wonderful music by Antarjyami Muni in this movie. It's a kind of minimalistic music, a strange buzz of different frequencies. The whole effect of this beautiful movie is a dreamy dance of nature, it is both restless and calm, dramatic and lyric.
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