All fans of visually beautiful paintings, such as cult ones: “Baraka”, “The Tree of Life” and “Artist”, reviews of the film “Samsara” call to pay attention to this masterpiece. The name in Sanskrit means "continuous flow" or "constantly spinning wheel of life", as the filmmakers translate it. Filmed by director Ron Fricke and producer, co-editor and co-author Mark Magidson for four years, in twenty-five countries around the globe, the film is a cinematic narrative that uses rhythms and music to emphasize revelations and surprises.
Contrast images
Location: Nepal, Angkor Wat, Arctic, Tokyo, Arizona, Kenya, Yosemite, Dubai, Philippine Prison and the border between North and South Korea. This is a collection or collage of beautiful and vibrant images, brought together for an impressive and meditative effect.
The documentary Samsara is based on various opposites: growth-decline, surprise-disgust, tradition-rootlessness, goal-futility, faith-disbelief. There are sharp contrasts in the picture, such as a colorful, doll-shaped Asian girl dressed in shimmering gold with bright red cherry earrings, and African men and women wearing a body mask and patient facial expression; The rage of the volcano spews sparkling rubies into the air, while bright clouds swirl in the sky, pristine sand in the vast desert contrasts with the intricate details of gold leaf frescoes and cherubs on the cathedral ceiling.
Action picture
The film "Samsara" has no plot as such. This is a film in which there is no narration, commentary or dialogue, but there is, ideally suited, New Age ethnic music. Samsara travels the world to Tibetan monks, African tribesmen, Chinese factory workers, the tangled Los Angeles freeway, the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina, and much more.
The film contains a bird's-eye view of a chic oriental hotel, a view of naked mannequins in sexy poses, dancers on a pole in a bikini and a convex belly of a fat man. Images of hens, cows and pigs at different stages of the life cycle from captivity to the table are alarming, as is the production line on which corpses, meat and bones are processed.
According to reviews, the film "Samsara" supports the themes of life and death, constancy and impermanence, the flow and rhythm of our world energy in everything. It contains a scene in which Tibetan monks painstakingly work on a detailed picture of sand (which serves as a metaphor for the film and creates a continuous thematic through line), and then destroy it.
Technical skill
It is difficult to describe Samsara, in addition to the fact that the picture was created thanks to many technical achievements. The film itself is a rare artifact, due to the technical abilities and the will of the creators of the film, who had to capture these images. Fricke is a real filmmaker, when most films were shot at 35 mm (more mm, more resolution), Samsara is captured on a 70 mm film converted to digital 4k. Which really just means that the picture looks absolutely incredible. No grain, no jumps, no blur.
Viewers, leaving reviews of the film "Samsara", indicated that the footage was not like anything they had ever seen before. A characteristic feature of the picture, the innovative use of camera movement in slow motion mode is visually breathtaking, alternating with stunning slow-motion movie portraits of various objects throughout the journey. The film has a rhythm and flow, which decreases like hot flashes, and an account that pulsates with a person’s heartbeat.
Sense in every frame
The art of creating a picture is to manipulate the images with the camera, these images are combined, edited to create sentences, paragraphs and pages of the script simply by comparing them. Although it is possible to discuss the technical mastery of these shocking and beautiful images, this does not do justice to the spiritual cinematic power of this work. The scenes of believers in Mecca, or the moon traveling across a deserted sky, or workers at a poultry farm are visually dazzling, but this does not mean the emotional power permeated by each frame.
Fricke knows that with all his computer camera movements and frame-by-frame shooting, sometimes relying on a close-up of the Filipino's eye of a prisoner, a young African mother and child, or a lone tear of a geisha sliding on her cheek, is more emotionally strong than anything technologically spectacular. The director can also switch emotional punches in seconds, making us laugh at a man buried in a huge coffin-like coffin, and then look with horror at the mass production of pistols and bullets.
Reviews of the film "Samsara"
The picture tells the story of our world, this journey around the world, demonstrating the enormous beauty and grotesque horrors of mankind, alternating with stunning natural landscapes and the consequences of natural disasters. But still, the reviews about the film "Samsara" are somewhat controversial. For some, he turned out to be a collection of vivid visual effects without any emotional uplift, but he made an indelible impression on someone, made him think about the meaning of life and God, society and technology. Nevertheless, the viewers agree in one opinion that Samsara is an amazingly beautiful and visually stunning film in which you can get lost.