1982’s
Koyaanisqatsi, directed by Godfrey
Reggio and photographed by Ron Fricke, was a landmark countercultural doc,
using staggering imagery and a hypnotic Philip Glass score to warn how modern
life’s accelerated pace had come to tip the planet out of balance. Fricke has
since taken up the directorial mantle (and this cause) himself, first with
1985’s Chronos, then 1992’s Baraka, and now Samsara, which ventures East both physically and spiritually, inspired
by Buddhism’s “wheel of life” philosophy. To Lisa Gerrard’s score, the sun
rises over the desert and sets over the city; the tide comes in, and goes out;
and people mill around in timelapse footage, as insignificant as ants, only
with a more marked and deleterious effect on the planet around us.
In
a way, this is a public information film in gleaming 70mm: Fricke has gone to
extraordinary lengths to get us to wash out our Marmite pots and put them in
the right recycling bin on the right day. Samsara’s
precise colour palette is what digital projection and HDTV were invented for,
making painterly distinctions between the reds, yellows and golds of the
desert, the lush greens of the jungle, and the purple and blue-painted faces of
Far Eastern dancing girls. Against which the drab greyness of our cities as
viewed from afar starts to look damning indeed: even the whites of the pilgrims
lapping Mecca start to look like so much soapy water swirling down a plughole.
When
the film takes the long view, it’s undeniably spectacular: in a single
helicopter shot, Fricke nails the near-cosmic unreality of the newly developed
Dubai, rising up out of nowhere as a rich man’s playground. Elsewhere, you may
just have to clench your teeth at some crude juxtapositions – between robust
American gunlovers and petite, sobbing Asian women, say – intended to impress
upon us the notion we’re all thoughtless automatons hellbent on crushing the
Third World one Whopper at a time. There’s so much eye candy viewers may lapse
into diabetic shock, but the editorial proves equally sobering and hectoring:
as Fricke’s regular inserts of statues make clear, Big Buddha is watching us.
Samsara is in selected cinemas.
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