There was something completely different at the Robert Burns
Centre film Theatre Film Club on Monday evening, in fact something very
different. Mike Gray introduced a film
that was completely devoid of narrative commentary, had no script and was chronicled
only through images and music. Samsara (2011) is directed by Ron Fricke, who was responsible for a similar
film Baraka (1992) had editorial and
cinematographer duties on Koyaanisqatsi
(1992) and 1998’s Powaqqatsi and
invented, developed and built the 70mm film time-lapse cameras that played a
key role in all these four films.
Filmed in 25 different countries over best part of a five-years,
Samsara is the Buddhist term for the cycle of life, death and rebirth and a
film in which music plays a very important part. ‘It’s neither a traditional documentary nor a travelogue it takes the
form of a nonverbal, guided meditation. Through powerful images, the film
illuminates the links between humanity and the rest of nature, showing how our
life cycle mirrors the rhythm of the plant’[1].
Mike finished his very informative introduction by inviting the RBC audience to
sit back and let the images and the music just flow.
The discussion that followed the film was probable the most animated
to take place this season with many differing views of what had been
illustrated. Although not in total agreement the audience seemed to appreciate
various different parts of the film. From my own prospective the first half
hour was like watching paint dry, but once people and cityscapes become more
involved the more interesting the experience became. The random images had no
real narrative structure some of which I found disturbing, the imagery of a
young child in a coffin for one and the eccentricity of the Frenchman sitting
at a desk in a business suit who covers his head in clay and transforms it to
represent a terrifying “joker’ mask, images, like some of the facial close-ups,
I found intrusive. The film highlighted the mess that the capitalist world are
making of the planet where people who live outside of reality seem to care more
about the treatment of chickens than children, by reality I mean to desperate
need to feed the world that forces us to use forms of factory farming against
the ever depleting and costly food stocks and if we do not, millions will die.
Where it’s wrong to build a wall in Berlin but not by the Israelis to imprison
Palestinians! The most startling of Frick’s
illustrations was the patterns created by regimented people, the marching
troops and tanks in what looked like North Korea, people at work in massive
factory’s and the millions milling around Mecca.
A film you may not instantly fall in love with but one you
certainly can’t ignore, one in which you conjure up your own emotion and a film
that proves that there’s beauty in the most inhuman acts even when the film
highlights the atrocious living conditions imposed on the most disfranchised of
human lives.
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