Showing @ Filmhouse, Edinburgh, until Thu 13 Sep
Ron Fricke / USA / 2011 / 102 min
It’s been 20 years since director Ron Fricke and producer Mark Magidson created the wordless documentary Baraka. Their new film Samsara offers a similarly rich sensory fusion of the modern and the ancient, the natural world and human cultures.
Filmed in 25 countries over five years, Samsara opens with footage of doll-like Thai dancers before moving on to the roiling clouds of an erupting volcano. It is a clear sign that the film will offer a dynamic illustration of the forces of creation and destruction, beauty and disaster, which are constantly at play in the world. With no dialogue, no subtitles, and no distinct narrative, it is down to Fricke and Magidson to point their audience towards the intended links.
Thus, footage of factory farming leads into frenetic visions of wholesale shoppers. Images of plastic surgery are intercut with the manufacture of sex dolls, pole-dancing pageant girls, and a lingering shot of a weeping geisha. The clarity provided by the use of 70mm film, the use of time lapse and slow motion techniques and the original score add to the overall effect of a lyrical, wordless elegy which encapsulates the world as it is, and as it has always been.