A scene from Ron Fricke’s Samsara. [Photo: Oscilloscope Laboratories]

Anyways, classics, whole genres, TV series, … there’s so much stuff I’m aware of but that I’ve never seen. I don’t know why I’m writing this disclaimer. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to come across as an avantgarde douchebag for writing the next couple of paragraphs. Maybe it’s to apologize in advance for any stupidity that might follow.

Anyways, I recently watched Baraka and Samsara.

Baraka has no plot, no storyline, no actors, no dialogue nor any voice-over. Instead, the film uses themes to present new steps and evoke emotion through pure cinema. Baraka is a kaleidoscopic, global compilation of both natural events and by fate, life and activities of humanity on Earth. – Wikipedia

Expanding on the themes they developed in Baraka (1992) and Chronos (1985), Samsara explores the wonders of our world from the mundane to the miraculous, looking into the unfathomable reaches of man’s spirituality and the human experience. Neither a traditional documentary nor a travelogue, Samsara takes the form of a nonverbal, guided meditation. – About Samsara

They are both incredibly beautiful. And they provide a glimpse into the current state of our existence on this lovely little planet of ours. It shows our past and present, and how past and present are really present at the same time, sometimes at the same place even. It shows all the beauty and dispair of the human experience and how we collectively muddle through this thing called life in various forms.

Even though Baraka and Samsara are non-narrative, they tell a story, or they at least evoke a narrative about how our world is, how fragile civilisation, how different and at the same time universal our own private existence is. And above all, how much it is changing all the time.

It reminded me about how explorations like that are often the things that make a lasting expression on me. They move me, they make me think and they make me hungry to see the world. Displaying the diversity of life, all those different decisions and actions made everyday, all those different lives lived at this very moment in all their different forms – they will never stop to amaze me.

Some of those films take a more systemic point of view, others, the narrative ones mostly, focus on individual fates. There surely are many more of those, but, to refer back to the beginning – I’m not an expert.

Share:

• 

No related posts.

Ähnliche Artikel bereitgestellt von Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.