Samsara (2011)

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Movie
Original title Samsara
Country of production United States
Publishing year 2011
length 102 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Ron Fricke
script Ron Fricke,
Mark Magidson
production Mark Magidson
music Michael Stearns ,
Lisa Gerrard ,
Marcello de Francisci
camera Ron Fricke
cut Ron Fricke,
Mark Magidson

Samsara is an experimental documentary from 2011 directed by Ron Fricke . He had already made Baraka together with producer Mark Magidson . Samsara has been recorded in 25 countries around the world over a period of more than four years and is not only pleasant. Among other things, the film offers a critical look at the human food and consumption chain. Sequences show how animal food sources are dealt with. The film was shot on 70 mm film . The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2011 and was released internationally in August 2012.

Like Ron Fricke's predecessor film, Samsara does not require a main actor, dialogue or narrator. The main objective of the documentation is to depict the cycle of life in colorful and moving images, which should act like a non-verbal, guided meditation. In a montage technique, images of existence are lined up on our planet. Accompanied by partly spherical music, they arouse both positive and negative associations and show both worldly and spiritual scenarios.

content

The documentary begins as the opening credits with images of Asian temple dancers, followed by monumental recordings of a volcanic eruption. This is followed by pictures of preserved fetuses , which alternate with the picture of the Tollund man .

A huge temple complex moves into the picture and gives insights into the life of Buddhist monks, from operating the prayer wheel to creating a mandala out of colored sand, the finest structures and shapes of which seem to be in perfect symmetry. Aerial photos show the vastness of a desert and destroyed sculptures and other evidence of the cultures that have disappeared there. The scene changes to New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina destroyed large parts of the city. This is followed by impressions of the magnificent French Palace of Versailles , then photos of different child baptisms and pictures of the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral . Again the scene changes to natural wonders and holy places of different religions, recorded shortly before sunrise or sunset. This is followed by pictures of African natives in traditional face-painting, as well as African mothers with their children. In contrast, the scene jumps to the hustle and bustle of the big city with its never-ending flow of traffic, monotonous workplaces and very hectic leisure activities. The camera “flies” from the desert cities of America over the ocean to Dubai and the newly built Palm Islands . This is followed by a short visit to the opera followed by a bustle in the big city: people who jostle in lanes, mostly to get to work. At the workplaces in huge factory halls, women assemble irons on the assembly line - monotonously and robotically. Shortly afterwards the camera points to the products of human consumption and their worldly end: Cars are compressed in the scrap press, disused PCs are piled up in a warehouse and are dismantled by men, the rest that is no longer needed is shredded. After these consumer goods, there is a shift to food production: Hundreds of workers in a hall manufacture dumplings with vegetable filling in a piece on a line and by hand. What follows is a depressing section on factory processing. Thousands of chickens ready for slaughter are sucked out of the crowd by a machine like a vacuum cleaner and then placed in plastic boxes by workers for further transport. The division of the slaughtered animals is again done by hundreds of people in a huge hall. Dozens of cows in factory farming are milked on a rotary milking parlor, and sows have to suckle their piglets, squeezed into a metal frame. This is followed by the assembly line processing of slaughtered fattening pigs into portioned pieces of meat. A supermarket scene shows crowds shopping and eating food in a fast-food restaurant. The result: obese people for whom the doctor is preparing an operation to reduce body fat. A woman is undergoing cosmetic surgery to correct her nose. The camera pans into a production facility for plastic love dolls, whose faces are manufactured with great care in order to appeal to a very specific clientele. But people are becoming such a consumer good too, and women are shown dancing to please men. Images of the big city alternate with shots in slums up to a huge garbage dump where adults and children look for something useful. From here the scenery changes to sulfur workers who on foot fetch the element in baskets from a crater and transport it up for kilometers. The confrontation with the end of life follows. Both very individual coffins are shown, but also the manufacture of weapons and ammunition, which can then be found in all parts of the world. Military parades can be seen and mass sports events, as well as the border between North and South Korea , which is monitored by armed force.

Masses of Muslim pilgrims go to the Kaaba in Mecca and pray. The documentary ends with pictures from the beginning and the Buddhist monks are now destroying their mandala. Temple dancers complete the picture.

background

The film title samsara is a word that comes from Sanskrit , a form of ancient Indian. It means something like "the perpetual cycle of being" or "the cycle of becoming and passing away".

criticism

Prime-Video rated: "Samsara, [is] a cinematic meditation on the cycle of life, [...] The film shows the whole spectrum of the beautiful and pleasant as well as the horrific and terrible using realistic scenes from everyday life in our world Sides of our existence. Often the most impressive and shocking scenes are those that we encounter every day, but which we no longer consciously perceive because we suppress them. Who cares about the daily traffic madness in our big cities, about the production and distribution of food, about inhuman working methods and the like. Ron Fricke manages this excellently in his film without any comment. "

epd-film.de criticizes: “Strange but also here the extensive fixation of the US-American production on exotic people and places, some of which have become almost standard topoi for documentary curiosity in the last decades: Indonesian sulfur mines, Chinese workers columns, Brazilian garbage dumps - everything in Panavision with opulent musical accompaniment. At some point the thought arises whether - especially with the spiritual approach postulated by the authors for themselves - it would not have been more appropriate to face the world with less gigantomania and more humility in terms of film technology. "

“Whatever impressions the audience takes with them from the cinema at Samsara, everyone will interpret what they have seen differently.” “But you shouldn't have any illusions: as picturesque as some nature shots may be, the filmmaker seems curious when he comes to indigenous people approaches that seem untouched so far, so shocking are the other elements and so unpleasant are the connections he makes between them. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ FSK at epd-film.de
  2. ↑ Filming Locations. The official site for the films SAMSARA and BARAKA, accessed on March 16, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Samsara. Busch Media Group GmbH & Co KG, accessed on March 16, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Samsara retrieved from moviepilot.de.
  5. ↑ Samsara at amazon.de, accessed on May 20, 2019.
  6. ↑ Review of Samsara at epd-film.de, accessed on May 20, 2019.
  7. ↑ Review at treffpunkt-kritik.de, accessed on May 20, 2019.
  8. ^ The Samsara Food Sequence. Zeit Online, October 15, 2013, accessed March 16, 2019 .