A Warning for a Global Village
A Review of Ron Fricke's Baraka
It is unfortunate for Baraka that words of praise such as bewitching and breathtaking are offered with such thoughtless ease, for it is the rare film deserving of such acclaim. (Measured responses to mediocre films don’t, I suppose, draw as many clicks.) Baraka reunites director and cinematographer Ron Fricke and producer Mark Magidson, who had previously collaborated on 1985’s Chronos. Their goal following that film was to embark on the production of a feature-length project, and so comes 1992’s Baraka, the pair’s solemn reflection on the very nature of life and existence. The film owns its self-serious cerebrality, Fricke describing it as “a guided meditation on humanity.” Shooting it was a globe-spanning project that took Fricke, Magidson, and their team (always just a handful of people) to 25 countries, on every continent but Antarctica.
It is not just that Baraka says something different—which would be enough, particularly given the current era of sequels and spin-offs—but that it does something different and does it so well. The film, whose title means, approximately, “blessing”1 in Arabic, has no words, and indeed any textual description of its images is likely to be found wanting. Thus the audience goes without even location names. Fricke and Magidson don’t want to slight the ineffable beauty and complexity of anything you see with words. From one unnamed location to the next, we are confronted with beauties strange and mundane, triumphant and tragic. In the process, Baraka grapples with a question of utmost importance, indeed of importance impossible to express: what is a human being, and what is likely to make one happy? If the film offers no answer, it nonetheless hints that something is amiss. It also bears witness to the strange paradox that is humanity, with the beauty and splendor of our cultural achievements standing next to our ignorance, hatred, and violence. And although the filmmakers clearly have opinions and axes to grind, one is, from the first images and sounds on, carried away and filled with the emotional resonance of the moments so expertly captured.
The photographic expertise is indeed front and center here. Photography enthusiasts of all kinds are in for a treat, as the photographs themselves are without equal in their clarity and quality. Fricke shot Baraka in 65 mm film using a custom Todd-AO camera, producing some of the most astounding and moving images in all of film. Here, there are no tricks or special effects; even dissolves are avoided. The images are allowed the spotlight, real moments in time, unadorned. Not really a nature film and unlike traditional documentaries of all kinds, Baraka defies standard film genres. It is a decidedly non-standard project. “One could even go so far as to claim that Baraka exceeds the boundaries of film itself, in some ways having more in common with media other than film, such as music or photography.”2
At this point, some context is perhaps in order. Prior to directing Chronos and Baraka, Fricke was the cinematographer for 1982’s Koyaanisqatsi, Godfrey Reggio’s celebrated directorial debut and the archetype from which the Fricke and Magidson films follow. Discussing the genesis of Koyaanisqatsi, Reggio remarked upon the startling inadequacy of the existing stock of words to describe the world as it now is. The language and concepts we have inherited cannot describe this world, so Reggio left them out of Koyaanisqatsi. The commitment was to descriptive accuracy; Baraka shares this commitment, and by forgoing language—so deeply implicated in humankind’s various spooks—these films help lift us out of our ideologies and religions, our little models and abstractions. This, of course, also means that the films’ subjects are radically decontextualized3, a potential source of criticism. Where Koyaanisqatsi showcased its time-lapse sequences, hypnotic in their manic flurries of movement, Baraka’s shots hang on their subjects in real time, often with little movement, subtle, almost imperceptible movement. Portraits are long and close, perhaps uncomfortably so, studies of faces that beckon the viewer to wonder about their subjects’ lives, not least their inner lives. Because so many reviewers have remarked upon Baraka’s engagement with the ideas of Joseph Campbell, it is not necessary to dwell upon it or oversell it. Needless to say, Baraka is a story—and it is a story, despite its lack of either dialogue or a traditional plot—that takes place on a planetary scale, a story about human beings and our role on this astronomical object hurtling through space at about 67,000 miles per hour. Campbell noted that “today there are no boundaries. The only mythology that is valid today is the mythology of the planet—and we don’t have such a mythology,” for mythologies spring up out of particular human societies, a society being a “bounded field.” We humans only went global, without boundaries, a comparatively very short time ago, so our myths correspond with various groups, whether ethnic or religious or national, etc. It is worth noting that Campbell called Buddhism “[t]he closest thing I know to a planetary mythology,” as Baraka’s filmmakers were clearly influenced by Buddhist ideas, among them suffering, impermanence and the ceaseless cycle of life, death, and rebirth (in a show of devotion to these ideas, they named Baraka’s sequel Samsara).
Baraka is a commentary on those transcendent values shared worldwide across all of humanity, carrying a particular variation of a New Age-y one-world thesis. But it also presents a clear, trenchant critique of globalization as it has transpired. For the filmmakers, it is at the very least far from clear that global capitalism, with its drone-like assembly-line workers and low-quality, mass-produced everything, represents a meaningful improvement over traditional ways of life. It is not mere coincidence that degradation of the natural world runs concurrent with degradation of social and cultural life, for it could not be otherwise. Baraka sets forth an incisive challenge to the ideologies of infinite progress and growth, offering the viewer a fuller understanding not only of the beautiful color and diversity of what we’re losing, but the emptiness and desolation of the new global monoculture. It furthermore presents a challenge, at least implicitly, to the claim that this global monoculture results from the effectuation of liberal humanist values. The idea that genuine human freedom has no preconditions related to social unit size or applications of technology is so clearly detached from reality that it should have no purchase. We must seriously perpend the possibility, against the unquestioned promises of unlimited progress, growth, and consumption, that there is a real, tangible relationship, one that all but requires human beings to live in relatively small groups and with a real connection to the natural world. If we regard this as implying a demotion of some kind, then we probably don’t appreciate the extent to which that feeling results from ideology rather than any fact about reality.
Pierre Clastres, in Society Against the State, “note[d] the stupidity of the concept of subsistence economy,” observing that, in fact, “it has become possible recently to speak of groups of paleolithic hunters and gatherers as ‘the first affluent societies.’” In a sense, it may be difficult to imagine more affluent societies, for, as Fredy Perlman wrote, “none of them ever worked. And everyone knows it.” At least as it is traditionally used, describing life “in a permanently fragile equilibrium between alimentary needs and the means for satisfying them,” the concept simply does not describe archaic societies. It may apply more aptly to our modern industrial and high-technological society, the gigantic, tottering institutions of which are actually extremely vulnerable to catastrophic events of various kinds. As Clastres was at pains to make us see, we are observing and judging everything from within “the ideological purview of the modern West,” using invented concepts that do not reflect science or reality. Less than a decade before his death, Benjamin R. Tucker foresaw impending doom for humanity, remarking, “The Monster, Mechanism, is devouring mankind.” Baraka carries a similar warning, if we can make it out.
More specifically and fully, the concept of baraka has been explained as “nearness that allows prosperity,” that is, the literal infection of one with the blessings of holy people or objects. See Dietrich von Denffer. “Baraka as Basic Concept of Muslim Popular Belief.” Islamic Studies, Vol. 15, No. 3 (AUTUMN 1976), pp. 167-186.
Roberts, Martin. “‘Baraka’: World Cinema and the Global Culture Industry.” Cinema Journal, vol. 37, no. 3, 1998, pp. 62–82.
Ibid.