Showing posts with label Ron Fricke. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ron Fricke. Show all posts

Friday, September 21, 2012

Samsara (Ron Fricke, 2012)

Ron Fricke's latest tone poem, Samsara, takes its name from a concept shared among Indian religions pertaining to life, death and rebirth. Its root in the constant change of the world fits the film's structure, which trades the focus of Fricke's own Baraka or Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi trilogy for a more free-associative collage of world imagery. Opening on jarring close-ups of a ritualistic dance performed by three little people, Samsara only gets more bewildering when it moves from this show to the eruption of a volcano and the cooling of lava.

Yet the titular idea also connotes a cyclical movement of life and rebirth, giving order to its vastness, and Samsara soon reveals its unifying theme to be that of various ordering properties. That opening dance, so bewildering as an introduction, soon becomes part of a larger tapestry of ritual, organization and routine of humanity in nature and urban development alike, and even those of the Earth. This explain the footage of the exploding magma and solidifying lava flows, a miniature cycle of destruction and reformation the planet has seen across hundreds of millions of years. Fricke even includes a near-bookend of Tibetan monks playing horns to wake their village, a sort of invocation and benediction that reflects the cycle of the film's loose subject matter and the organizing properties at work on all cultures.