Indian Peaks Dawn #2. Boulder County, Colorado, 2012
We saw the film Samsara (2011, 102 minutes, directed by Ron Fricke) this week and I want to recommend it as a wonderful, overwhelming, and sometimes shocking, visual banquet for photographers (and anyone else with natural curiosity, really).
As photographers, though, it is always a great idea to broaden our vistas by partaking of the other arts when we get a chance–dance, music, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, opera, literature…and, most certainly, film. It’s a tremendously fun way to stimulate those little gray cells and to come up with new creative ideas for our images.
Samsara is apparently an old Sanskrit word that can be translated as “cyclic existence,” “continuous flow,” “cycle of creation and destruction,” or “the ever-turning wheel of life”. Indeed, the film deals with the tremendous range of the human experience and our relationship with other cultures and our environment. For a movie with no dialogue–only a wonderfully diverse score written by Michael Stearns, Lisa Gerrard and Marcello De Francisci–it certainly is successful in provoking thought, introspection, debate, awe, and wonder with its spectacular, ever-changing scenes and strange juxtapositions of those scenes.
The film took five years to make and was filmed in 25 different countries throughout the world. The 70mm camera work uses both slow motion and fast motion to create some really unforgettable and unusual imagery.
Some highlights for me…the repetition of the motif of the eyes–often staring, unblinking and direct, at the audience…the French performance artist Olivier de Sagazan and his wild “mud play”…the opening scenes filmed from a hot air balloon of the ancient and surreal Buddhist temple ruins in Myanmar…the 1000 Hands Dance in Beijing…the Kawah Ijen Sulfur Mine in Java, Indonesia…the mind-blowing Chinese factory scenes…the aerial views in fast motion of the pilgrims at Mecca…just to mention a few.
For more information, see the official Samsara web site here. Better yet, find out where it’s playing and go see the film yourself–your little creative photographer gray cells will thank you!
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