If everybody’s vacation photos looked like the enthralling images in Samsara, nobody would dread the hoary tradition of slogging through a guided tour of their friends’ travel highlights.
But the filmmakers behind Samsara weren’t on vacation: Director Ron Fricke and producer Mark Magidson spent three years lugging heavy camera gear around the world shooting gorgeous vistas, technological marvels and living portraits of average people.
They visited 25 countries in their continent-hopping quest for astonishing visuals, at one point braving clouds of sulfuric acid vapor alongside workers in a dangerous sulfur mine. Then they spent another year and a half in post-production, editing down the 20 hours of footage they gathered into a 102-minute film that Fricke calls a “guided meditation on the themes of birth, death and rebirth.”
“We don’t have a main character, or a story-driven dialog film, so the image is that,” Fricke said in a phone interview with Wired. “We want the essence of these locations to come through in the imagery.”
Don’t let the “guided meditation” label or the international glamor shots used to market the new movie fool you. While this type of film can easily be written off as a multi-culti head trip for the pot-and-patchouli crowd, the truth is, you don’t need a cranium full of cannabis to become completely intoxicated by Samsara’‘s vivid view of the world.
A non-narrative film completely devoid of dialog, Samsara’s gorgeous images speak for themselves. It is a sequel of sorts to Fricke and Magidson’s 1992 film Baraka (the filmmaking duo also worked together on 1985 IMAX short Chronos). And all are stylistically reminiscent of 1982′s Koyaanisqatsi (Fricke served as cinematographer on that one).
Like those films, Samsara, a PG-13 stunner that opens Friday, delivers plenty of vivid time-lapse images and takes us to some of the farthest reaches of our world.
“It’s really focused on, ‘What are we bringing back on the negative?’” Magidson said. “We’re trying to make the best possible film we can, and it’s about bringing back imagery.”
There are no killer catchphrases, no car chases, no shootouts and no annoying alien sidekicks. Since there are no words — or even any labels for the many exotic filming locations — the movie fosters an inner dialog that will undoubtedly vary from viewer to viewer.
“‘Samsara’ is a word that means birth, death and rebirth, or impermanence, so there are broad themes that flow from that word,” said Fricke, but the main objective was an eye-pleasing stream of evocative imagery. “Flow was really our intention.”
And flow Samsara does. Images of natural beauty (a Hawaiian volcano, African waterfalls) blend seamlessly with shots of humanity’s endeavors, old and new (ancient Turkish statues, an ornate French palace, a modern robotics factory). Some shots — like portraits of Ethiopian villagers wearing face paint and toting rifles — effectively blur the line between yesterday and tomorrow.
“I think we’d say the most powerful images in this film are when that flow gets interrupted … the animals in cages, people in prison and walls around religions … also dolls that replicate humans,” said Fricke. “The flow is different, much more intense.”
As Samsara’s tempo quickens, scenes at a high-tech poultry plant yield to a feeding frenzy in a Costco food court, a sequence that seemed the most overt “statement” in a film that largely delivers its powerful visual payload without hammering home a particular message.
“We’re trying to refrain from making it too much of a point of view or a political point of view or rise to an intellectual-type experience, and keep it in that inner experience,” said Magidson. “It’s just a fine line to walk when you’re structuring a film like this.”
The starting point for Samsara’s filmmakers was a big camera and a small crew. Eschewing digital for the “emotional impact” provided by 70-millimeter film, they used a camera that weighted 55 pounds when loaded with a 500-foot film magazine capable of capturing just three minutes of footage.
Over the course of the three films Fricke and Magidson have collaborated upon, they’ve refined their equipment package so that a team of four or five people can operate the bulky camera. Specialized tools let the filmmakers pan, tilt and use other tricks of the cinematic trade while shooting time-lapse images.
Using film might be more difficult — especially when lugging a camera to the top of a mountain or trying to get film stock through a security checkpoint — but the format forces you to think a certain way, and helps produce unique results.
“You’re more grounded,” Fricke said. “You’ve got to know where to put that camera, and also you gotta think ahead — where you gonna put it next? You think more like a still photographer.”
In a way, Fricke’s visuals are quite similar to classic portrait photography: beautifully composed, richly textured and almost always opening up a window into the subjects’ soul.
“You’re trying to just let the essence of that subject matter reveal itself,” Magidson said, “and Ron is just the best in the world at doing that.”
While we’re virtually all photographers and filmmakers these days — and the old “let me show you our vacation pictures” tradition has been largely subsumed by an unending deluge of our more-or-less crappy pictures on Facebook and Instagram — Fricke offered a bit of advice for capturing spectacular images of people, no matter who they are, where they are or what language they speak.
“We just gave that direction, to look right into the camera, and don’t blink,” said Fricke, who photographed everything from Asian geishas to American gun owners to fill out Samsara’s astonishing portrait of the world.
“Not all of them worked,” Fricke added. “Some of them blinked.”
All photos from Samsara courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories.
