Baraka
Director : Ron Fricke
USA, 1992
It was Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz who observed that "it's judgement that defeats us". Many people felt that Baraka should have given more details of what you were looking at and why instead of only presenting images. But all the locations are listed at the end, it's easy enough to find out which location is where and any history behind it. Baraka is a film that shows you life, a wide spread of life, and presents it without judgement. This is what happens, this is what is going on in the world of 1992; what you make of that, think about it, feel about it, do about it - that's up to you.
That's not to say that there isn't a certain amount of guiding going on. The central message being sent to us is a simple one - we're all the same really. Shots of various religions kissing venerated objects follow each other, shots of a Yakuza full body tattoo cuts to tribal body decoration. Everywhere people stare into the camera. There is no attempt to tell us their thoughts, their backgrounds, their lives. The point is to wonder.
What you take from Baraka will be personal to you. Some parts you will remember better than others. You may return to it at different times in your life and find different things. You might watch it two days in a row and find different things. Indeed, the scale of the film is such that it really requires repeat viewings, there are simply too many images to digest first time through. And images is what Baraka is all about, each one a living photograph. Fans of Edward Burtynsky will be immediately at home here in some of the vast landscapes and the Asian assembly lines. Each individual scene is so precisely tracked, time-lapsed, composed or lit that it could stand alone. If there's one initial criticism of Baraka, it might be that 90 minutes of this is just too much. Repeated viewings remove this obstacle, however.
Baraka was made in 1992, so already parts of it are lost to us. Kowloon Walled City, which appears only briefly, underwent demolition within a year of the film's release. The burning oil fields in Kuwait was a current political event. How stunning these images are to us today, but how much more so in 100 years? Really a film like Baraka ought to be made every 10 years, to help us look at ourselves and evaluate what we are and what we're doing.
Baraka is not all current by any means. Besides linking world cultures, the film attempts to link spaces in time. In one of the first scenes we are shown a snow monkey relaxing in a hot spring meditatively. It closes its eyes and our view is thrown up to the stars, which could almost be a tribute to '2001 : A Space Odyssey'. Ron Fricke said he was keen for it to be a non-human providing that opening, because as soon as you place a human in there you invite judgement for nationality, ethnicity, religion etc. The use of a monkey is particularly inspired; by linking to the stars we understand that the monkey is being shown as a distant evolutionary cousin and that this film has something to say about all of us.
The snow monkeys have since gone on to star in countless wildlife documentaries. The elaborate temple ritual has been shown in adverts separately. Images of the solar eclipse seem barely worth writing about these days. Even the vast pile of shoes at Auschwitz or the rows of skulls in the Cambodian death camps seem over-exposed nowadays in our 24 hour internet age. Baraka was made for a world prior to that, which begs the question - is there still a need for Baraka?
My personal answer is yes, absolutely. Though it was high-definition before high definition existed and many of the scenes and images are now familiar, a great many still are not. Familiar scenes may even give us respite, which allows the inbetween moments to hit us still harder. Scenes of homeless children sleeping against hot air vents, or of a burning corpse at a Ganges cremation, or of tiny chicks being dispassionately sorted and flung through disinfected steel machinery, having their beaks scorched and ending up as battery hens. Much of Baraka is beautiful. Some is unpleasant, some is uncomfortable, some is amusing. Often there is beauty in the sadness, or sadness in the beauty. Baraka is life; make of it what you will.