Samsara has no faith in words. But it has, in the parlance of a certain generation of '60s progressives, 'a lot to say’. There is no narration and no dialogue, either scripted or incidental. It’s a film in the tradition of the Quatsi trilogy Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002). Godfrey Reggio, who originated these films, once testified to the power of the image this way: 'It's because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live." He might as well have been declaring his devotion to cinema.
The film asserts a 'universality’ of experience
Reggio, in these pictures, armed with music from Philip Glass and a seductive cinematic technique that seemed forged in the gee-wiz crucible of Cinerama and sci-fi, traded in conventional psychology and sociology for the guided wisdom of the ancients. His movies travelled the globe in a kind of awe-in-the-face-of-natural-beauty and, at the same time, they wore a cloak of mourning for man’s folly and waste. Naysayers called his films a New Age travelogue. Gaga fans call them 'trippy’.
Samsara is made by Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson. Fricke, who shot Koyaanisqatsi, directs and Magidson produces. They both edited the film’s stunning footage – captured on 70mm and later scanned to digital – and they’ve shaped it into a pulsing rhythm that lasts 100-plus minutes. The final result is sensuous and visceral; the panoramic views – of cities, rivers, deserts, waterfalls, and volcanos – have a dizzying, vertiginous, almost but not quite 3D effect. The close ups of, say, faces here are so rich in detail, the effect is sculptural. The pores in the subjects’ skin become abstract art, like cratered landscapes.
The title derives from Sanskrit and it has been translated as meaning something like 'cyclic existence’. The movie has no narrative; but it is a formal exercise and there is a stern moral here too.
As it opens, Fricke shoots up close, in magnificent granular detail, Buddhist monks working on a sand painting called a mandala; an elaborate design that uses circles and squares as key concepts. Jung claimed the mandala as a portrait of the unconscious and I think so do Fricke and Magidson, for 'circles and squares’ become the basis for many of the film’s set-piece compositions. The film asserts a 'universality’ of experience and belief expressed in this basic design, especially in terms of religion. For instance, late in the piece there’s a shot of Mecca (a square) from an extreme high angle, with worshippers seen swirling around it forming a circle"¦
On the film’s official website the filmmakers bravely assert that the film is 'Neither a traditional documentary nor a travelogue, Samsara takes the form of a nonverbal, guided meditation". That sounds lofty and noble but part of the seductive power of Samsara – and its 'sister’ movies, Chronos (1985) and Baraka (1992) – is that it is a particularly sophisticated form of 'travel-porn’. That is, its allure is in the way it captures and 'reshapes’ those peoples, places and doco-subjects, made overly familiar in the popular sub-genre of 'infotainment’.
Shot in 26 countries, Samsara has African tribes, crowded subways, checkpoints, dead-eyed teenagers toting shotguns, open cut mines and a weeping geisha. I was reminded most of all, of the kind of slideshows I saw at school, aimed at warning us kids off of the perils of abortion and excessive drugs. The effect isn’t transcendent or poetic. It’s like a hard slap in the face.
Throughout Fricke and co. cut away from their splashy panoramas to posed and staged cameos where characters gaze directly into the camera. The subjects include a marine veteran whose face has been seared away (and rebuilt), a result of a combat injury; a Japanese stripper and a Balinese dancer. Fricke shoots them as portraits. It’s lovely in a way, but I kept thinking of figures in a diorama. Their humanity isn’t touching; it’s alienating. Fricke might advise me to cleanse that thought.
The portrait/images are edited alongside vignettes about, say, war and sex; but the ultimate effect is lame. Fricke reminds us that war kills and sex is a commodity. We get a glimpse inside a factory making sex dolls. We see spectacular close-ups of high-calibre bullets. I just thought how extraordinarily pretty the ammo looked especially in the way the light danced on their gold-like metal jackets.
There is a long episode about the way in which 'food is produced’. This entails watching battery chickens 'feed’ machines in what one assumes is some undisclosed Third World factory operation; the animals, flapping and panicked are scooped into this whirly-gig type thing that looks like a gigantic floor waxer. This bit is followed with scenes of obese characters chowing on fast food in the unforgiving, heartless white light of a shopping mall, which looks like the U.S.
Fricke and Magidson don’t have any discernible sense of humour. The closest they get to a gag is when this vignette ends with a montage of characters being 'measured’ up for cosmetic surgery; a grimly amusing pay-off that’s typical of the film’s hardline on the wasteful moral and social economy of the First World. Its black comedy at best, but it relieves the film’s earnestness momentarily and I for one was grateful; the grim mood of 'life on earth going to Hell in a hand basket’ of the movie is relentless.
Given the earnest declarations of Samsara’s makers, the film I think has an unintended ironic fallout. In its faith in technique, its complete craven dedication to the exquisite image, it makes the unacceptable, the ugly and the nightmarish extraordinarily beautiful.
