Baraka
Réal: Ron Fricke, 1992
Cinebooks'
Motion Picture Guide Review
This is a paralyzingly beautiful documentary with a global vision: an odyssey through
landscape and time, that is an attempt to capture the essence of life.
Synopsis
The film begins with a blazing solar
eclipse, followed by scenes of ancient religions, including Buddhist monks, African tribal
rituals, and Jerusalem's Wailing Wall. Next are images of spectacular natural beauty,
including rain forests, Australia's Ayers Rock, Big Sur country, and Hawaiian volcanoes.
These are slowly displaced by views of the horrors of modern civilization, including
teeming Brazilian slums, time-lapse footage of car and pedestrian traffic, people
scavenging through a mountain of sun-smoldering garbage, and the eerie post-Persian Gulf
War shots of Kuwait's burning oil fields. Next are near-gruesome scenes detailing the
Buddhist burning-of-the-dead ceremonies at India's ghats, followed by a Japanese monk
floating a flower on a still pool of water. The movie concludes with brilliant starfields
against a jet black sky.
Critique
A message without words. Without using language or narration, and with its sweeping visuals, BARAKA—a Sufi word meaning "breath" or "essence of life"—is a powerful, ecology-championing Cook's Tour of the world. Producer Mark Magidson and director/cinematographer Ron Fricke previously teamed on the 1985 Imax-format film CHRONOS, while Fricke also made an Imax short (SACRED SITE) and was the director of photography and helped edit and write the similarly wordless, visually spectacular KOYAANISQATSI (1983) for director Godfrey Reggio. Unlike all of these films, however, Fricke permits himself a measure of moralizing in BARAKA.
Mythical quest
The general path of civilization is critically examined through juxtaposition of images, before the film ends as it started, staring into untainted skies. Thus, the crowded box-like Rio slum cuts to a towering mausoleum, while shots of an immense fiery furnace are intercut with the obscenely cold gas ovens at Auschwitz. While some of the countless locations are familiar (the Pyramids, Angkor Wat, Mount Everest, etc.), most are not, leading to a kind of disorientation that is part of the filmmakers's point: BARAKA is in part a search for an evolutionary myth that may, if understood, link us to a pristine past and perhaps provide a hope for the future. (Fricke and Magidson have cited Joseph Campbell's influential book The Power of Myth as a "personal challenge" to them to make the film.)
The end of innocence
The parade of
perfectly-composed shots is carefully punctuated by shots of people simply staring into
the camera. Fricke's imagery is overpoweringly beautiful, even that of desperate urban
squalor, which may very well be another part of the film's purpose, to question how our
culture's spiritually deficient, self-destructive path could have begun in such timeless,
stately innocence. Many scenes here, such as those of the impossibly self-absorbed
whirling dervishes or of a Japanese monk, lost in his own rituals and ignored by a mob
scene of commuters, are fiercely beautiful. Time-lapse scenes of New York's Park Avenue
rush hour traffic and the crowded Tokyo subway platforms (which carry a balletic, comic
beauty of their own) were shot with a computer-controlled camera Fricke helped develop for
this picture.
A global endeavor. Working on a reported $4 million budget, Fricke and Magidson, with a
three-person crew, swept through 24 countries in 14 months to make this stunning film,
which was released in the major cities in Todd-AO 70 mm. Unlike Reggio's films (including
POWAQQATSI), which were scored by Philip Glass, BARAKA less effectively uses a variety of
music sources, from chanting Dip Tse Ling monks to Dead Can Dance's "Host of
Seraphim" to spacey New Age material by Michael Stearns.
Voir aussi :
Lucky People Center International (Erik Pauser, Johan Söderberg, 1998)
La trilogie Qatsi (Godfrey Reggio) :
Koyaanisqatsi (1982) - Powaqqatsi (1988) - Naqoyqatsi (2002).Chronos (Ron Fricke, 1985)