Baraka

I never grow tired of watching nature documentaries or even those visually illuminating the city, Baraka thoughtfully depicting footage from around the globe with stunning piquant composed vibrant artistry.

It's easy to get caught up with your own active life or even that of your incumbent nation, while so many people from different jurisdictions engage in equally meaningful constructive lifestyles. 

Always thrilling to catch brief glimpses into multivariable globalized difference, whether it's a family subsisting in the jungle or the intense dynamics of inner-city life.

Some of it chill like large spiritual groups a' sittin' back chantin' peaceful rhythms, cohesively immersed within various communities promoting productive agile interactions.

Some of it distressing like the unenviable plight of the wee baby chick on its way to the dinner table, so much complex and moribund thought mechanically engineered to generate death. 

The machines, such incredible machines consistently moving with predictable motions, each tiny incalculable component seamlessly essential to the grandiose whole. 

I worry about my weed-whacker breaking down even though I hardly ever use it, there must be tens of thousands of parts if not more in these industrialized factories fabricating goods at all times.

In the same way the bucolic anthems of rural collectives maintain melodic harmonies, as hundreds of people work together in unison to directly praise nature and togetherness.

Coincidentally, how do you even find your place in these colossally imposing massive urban apartments?, if the elevator breaks you'd be in serious trouble and I don't even mind a bit of a walk from time to time.

It's like each building's its own small town and you can easily get lost within.

I imaging they have a level selling groceries etc.

How could you possible live with that many people?

Baraka presents compelling images opening up passages to holistic exploration, its spectrum vast and internationally eclective to village-city-business-and-wilderness.

A good companion piece for ye olde Samsara although watching both films in one night may lead to awestruck overload.

It may have been one of the first documentaries to approach the world in this fashion.

Therefore pioneering, brilliant, and seminal.

Samsara

Ron Fricke's Samsara takes upon itself the modest task of pictorially presenting an interdimensional panoramic account of a synthesized set of (free)ranging semantic variables, a fluid rhetorically viable atemporal mosaic whose effervescent movements are acoustically interwoven according (perhaps) to the harmonics of three itinerant factotums, who practically reverberate throughout the humanistic theoretical continuum, giving birth to hope, sculpting immobility, and choreographing the infinite.

The paradox discovered by Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation's All Good Things . . . offers a tool through which to begin cultivating interpretive comprehensions, although in Samsara said paradox seems to be critically oscillating in a cyclical undulation, in order to craft, what Fredric Jameson might describe as, an ontology of the present.

The only other film I've seen recently whose form, in varying degrees, produces similar affects, is Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, and the two films arguably create a matrix through which to compare the means by which two distinct historical periods use/d their cultural clay to mold multidimensional discursive globalized narratives.

I don't recommend watching The Holy Mountain unless you're into alternative cinema.

But to return to Samsara, I would contend that it suggests that the wisest thought-systems/ethical outlooks simultaneously celebrate the production of structured delicate intricate symmetrical collective masterpieces and their peaceful destruction (the Mandala), thereby humbly attempting to temporalize the eternal.

At other points, it presents incredible naturalistic syntheses of truth and illusion, concretely stylizes exhilaration, offers an absurd example of unfettered patriarchal ambition, interdisciplinarily collocates ancient forms with contemporary contents, patiently juxtaposes opulent and impoverished extremes, counterbalances manifold individuals with sundry groups, alternates the crushing affects of monosyllabic monstrosities with those of incarcerated liberation, conducts the best variation of a lament for the loss of an integrated prolonged cultural artistic fusion I've ever seen, and brilliantly equates both the means of mass production and its 'unforeseen' and mind boggling consequences/circumstances.

Without saying a word.

The apotheosis of philosophical realism metaphorically materialized? An emission/admission of im/mortality? Ostentation saturated with social justice?  Pinpointed timeless reciprocal constructivism?

It takes the cinematography from The Tree of Life to a whole new level (cinematography by Ron Fricke, shot on 70mm film).

Best film I've seen in a long time.