Samsara

September 7, 2012

Musical Direction by Michael Stearns
Original Music Composed by Michael Stearns
Supervising Producer: Alton Walpole
Edited by Ron Fricke, Mark Magidson, David E. Aubrey

Beginning thirty years ago, Koyaanisqatsi (1982), most famously, and its sequels, Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002), directed by Godfrey Reggio, provided a daringly broad and poetic cinematic vision of the world, unhampered by traditional narratives. Driven by dramatic photography and Philip Glass scores, it stood out from the cinematic repertoire as unique.

These were, by no means, Hollywood tales, nor were they topical documentaries. They were cataclysms of film, loosely analogous, in breaking new ground in that realm, to what Allen Ginsberg’s dramatic, evocative Howl (1956) represented in the world of poetry. More like elongated screams than carefully modulated articulations of vision, they were broad, expressive swaths of image and montage, evocative in their own distinctive way.

Samsara is the cinematic descendant of those films. In just over an hour and a half – quite exhausting because of its intensity and scope – the film shows just about everything under the sun. There are tribes all decked out, volcanoes, prisoners in the Phillipines performing a kind of mass disco routine, Asian garbage hunters, slaughterhouses, assembly lines, baptisms, sand mandalas… I could go on, but it would be exhausting.

The movie begins with a measured pace, but gradually builds to a frenetic indictment of modern society. If you know the penetrating photographs of Andreas Gursky, many of which depict the most alienating mechanical reproductions of human enterprise, those give a pretty good sense of what the filmmakers here are up to when they get around to dealing with contemporary society.

There is, in the midst of things, a very intense and disturbing sequence in which a man in a suit covers his face in a pancake goo of some sort and continues to shape and puncture it in an agitated way. It is an oddly individualized portrait stuck into the middle of a film which portrays virtually no other dramatized gestures of this kind. Perhaps the filmmakers intended this as a turning point between the earlier images of natural and tribal purity and the later ones which are rife with depictions of the corruptions of modern social existence. Hard to tell. But, stuck in the middle like that, this sequence, though vivid, is weirdly isolated.

There are many strange and interesting things depicted in this film, though it is never clear why they are all put together in the way that they are. Many serve to indict modern society, while others simply appear to depict something about the inherent fallenness of existence itself. The intent is never very clear.

The Buddhist notion of samsara suggests the illusoriness of the world in which we live, regardless of the particular shape it takes. Whether we are in tropical paradise or in urban squalor, the notion of samsara signifies the essential illusoriness of existence.

Despite its title, it is not at all clear that this film promotes that point of view. Though it does portray everything under the sun, its eventual strong and vivid critique of modern industrial culture trumps its early attempts to highlight the generic, beautifully shimmering, vulnerability of natural process and life in primitive social contexts.

The amount of filming that went into this project must have been enormous. Many of the many editing techniques subsequently used to create effects of various sorts are, for the most part, quite effective, and the amount of effort involved there is also striking.

There are, many incidents of long and lingering portraits of individuals from every walk of life, with practically all of them staring intensely into the camera, obviously coached to do so in a particular unblinking way by the filmmakers. While it has its own kind of force, each time it struck me how painstakingly staged each of these scenes had to have been.

Though it is not clear what this whole thing amounts to, I came out feeling like I had seen quite a bit of interesting stuff. Its epic sweep provides a vivid, sometimes moving, and frequently unsettling feeling. Though it does not have coherent narrative import, that does not seem to matter too much as long as one does not press too hard to find it.

– BADMan