By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington on Movies: Samsara
SAMSARA (Three and a Half Stars)
U.S.: Ron Fricke, 2011
Samsara is a film that, without words and without conventional scripting, with images and with muic, gives us the face of the world: mountains, water, factories, cities, a “goddess” with many arms and a man of many masks, places of worship, places of imprisonment, places of death, places where we see religious men and artists toiling over objects of beauty — including an image perhaps of samsara itself: the Sanskrit word that signifies the ceaselessly turning wheel of life. It is a beautiful film, and it makes you feel, if for only a moment, that the world is beautiful, or can be.
I know. You, or some of you, think that sounds pretentious. Sappy. You think that the film already sounds like a crock of phony crap and bunk spirituality, pseudo-Buddhist bibble-babble, a snob-trap to divert our attention from the real world — from its ugliness, its horror, its need for change. You, or some of you, yhonl you’d rather see a good show and the hell with all this 70mm mysticism and spirituality. Well, as William Blake once wrote “Mock on! Mock on!” You’re entitled. But the cinema exists to reveal the true beauty (and the true ugliness) of the world too, and these days we don’t see enough of either. I‘ll forgive Samsara director-cinematographer Ron Fricke his pretensions, in appreciation for the lovely images he‘s captured and framed for us here.
Fricke, who photographed Godfrey Reggio‘s Koyaanisqatsi, and (with producer-co-writer Mark Magidson) made Baraka and Chronos, returns here to the form that he and Reggio mastered. Clear, crystalline images of an amazing world, usually the Third World and the wilderness and cities (whirring ahead in time-lapse), accompanied by the throbbing, trance-like, repetitive scores of, originally, Philip Glass and here the very Glass-like music of Michael Stearns, Lisa Gerrard and Marcello De Francisci.
Samsara doesn’t simply drown us in pretty pictures, accompanied by pretty drones. There is terror and death here too: scariest of all, the images of factory farm bred chickens pulled into moving walls that squash and kill them en masse. The implications of mass slaughter, of humans as well as of animals, are inescapable.
Why the juxtaposition between these few images of destruction and/or modern decadence, and the many scenic wonders Fricke and Magidson unfold? No explanation is offered. There is a world around us, one we mostly don’t know, a world we miss. And here we have an hour and half to watch part of it, ponder on it, not to solve it perhaps, but to explore it.
One of the tasks of art is to create beauty. (I’ll call it a sacred task, since I lived most of my life with an artist and treasure her memory, and it‘s what she would have said.) Another is to reveal the truth, or to give us both, together. I wouldn’t be so pretentious as to say that Samsara achieves all or any of these. But it tries. Honor to it then, and praise to all cinema that reveals a world to us — worlds upon worlds, the wheels of death and the Wheel of Life as well.