Ron Fricke
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Filmography
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Connections, in both directions
Director-photographer Ron Fricke (Koyaanisqatsi, Baraka) seems to be making a spiritual statement about the unity of life (the title is a Sanskrit word meaning "cyclic existence"), but any sincerity inherent in the project is overwhelmed by the manufactured awe of its godawful New Age score.
“Samsara” is a sumptuous film by Ron Fricke, who directed “Baraka” and was cinematographer of “Koyaanisqatsi.”
The results, as in the previous films Fricke has photographed, including "Baraka," "Chronos" and "Koyaanisqatsi," can take your breath away.
Much like his films “Chronos,” or “Koyaanisqatsi”, Fricke’s “Samsara” (the word is Sanskrit for “continuous flow,” referring to the cycle of life) is a wordless documentary that is essentially a continuous flow of arresting images, sometimes sped up with time-lapse photography.
Thirty years ago, a popular film on the midnight-movie circuit was “Koyaanisqatsi.”
Its director and co-writer, Ron Fricke, served as a writer and cameraman on Koyaanisqatsi and made several similar docs, including 1992's Baraka — so his message is pretty clear.
Manufactured Landscapes (2006)
Directed by Jennifer Baichwal
influenced Samsara (2011)
Themes Visuals
Manufactured Landscapes showed us the detritus of the west being picked apart by Asian workers, then showed different Asian workers assembling new junk for the west to use up.
A scene showcasing the assembly-line tactics at a Chinese factory seems to have been lifted (stylistically and thematically) from Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes.
But it's also a ravishing meditation on life's dance in the shadow of death, featuring a "Midnight Express" flash mob and a young girl gravely shouldering her hot-pink rifle.
Like 2012’s similarly deluxe travelogue Samsara (directed by Reggio’s former DP Ron Fricke), Visitors is content to score broad points off modern life – a scene of fingers moving over an invisible tracking pad facilely paints us as slaves to technology – instead of seeking out genuinely surprising points of view.
That carved-rock city is Petra, as seen in “ Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade .”
The profusion of orange gates is the approach to Kyoto’s Inari Shrine, familiar from “ Memoirs of a Geisha .”
And there’s Tokyo’s bustling Hachiko intersection, which turned up not only in “ Lost in Translation ” but also in “Baraka.”