The combination of sound and images has warranted a wide variety of films with a lasting impact, but Ron Fricke's Baraka merits a unique one because of how much it shows and how little it actually says. Shot over the course of twenty-four countries on six continents in only a fourteen month period, Fricke captures some of the most immaculate images of the Earth, showing it, its people, and its natural beauty all in one richly photographed film. At only ninety minutes, this is a film with an impact guaranteed to hit you harder and harder after the credits roll.
Fricke takes a look at numerous corners of the Earth, particularly the impoverished ones, with several individuals struggling to survive or forging a method of surviving in the tumultuous lands where they reside. Fricke photographs the wildlife, the communities, and the precious landscapes that exist in these areas, in addition to showing landmarks like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Lake Natron in Tanzania, tribal celebrations in Kenya, and even monks gathered in a monastery.
It's fair to assume that Fricke is tired of seeing staged events of human life, or even exhausted from hearing shortchanged and ignorant remarks about people from other walks of life. Just by looking at what he decided to capture for the film, and how he wanted to edit it together, shows a person that is incredibly in-tuned with life around the world and appreciative of the Earth's natural beauty. However, Fricke doesn't dare neglect what he feels has made the Earth flawed. In one interesting sequence, Fricke juxtaposes factory-life with ordinary life in the city, at first showing employees in a cigarette factory and a countless number of baby chickens on a conveyor belt, waiting to be processed, and finally showing the society that embraces such things as cigarettes and freshly cut/prepared poultry.
I watched Fricke's followup to Baraka, Samsara, a few years back, and was absolutely marveled by many of the same features this film bears: impeccable natural beauty, a consistent tone and flow despite no narration whatsoever, divine cinematography, and one-of-a-kind sights and sounds. One of Samsara's many extractable morals was that the Earth is so complex and richly detailed and layered that it took many years to perfect and create to reflect the life we know in present day. Through numerous shots of calamity and destruction, however, we saw how that film detailed that something so beautiful and complicated could be demolished or lessened in an instant.
After watching Baraka, I can see how that idea was kickstarted. Fricke has no qualms about examining the ugly with the beautiful, or even finding a complex middle ground along the way. With this kind of layeredness, the film is prevented from being one you can view from only one way. Baraka is a free-form, impressionistic film with some of the most striking photography ever committed to film. If there's one film that's a testament to human spirit, human creation, and even arguably godlike creation, it's this one.
Directed by: Ron Fricke.
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