Samsara

Filmed in twenty-five countries over five years on 70mm film, Samsara is the third in Fricke's non-narrative trilogy after Koyaanisqatsi (which he photographed) and Baraka (which he directed). There is no dialogue. There is no narration. There are no subtitles. The score by Michael Stearns, Lisa Gerrard, and Marcello De Francisci shapes the experience without dictating it. The viewer is given image after image, organized in sequences whose logic emerges only on reflection.

On surface, the film is breathtakingly beautiful. Reviewers praised the cinematography. Audiences who came for nature documentary received that. The film is also confronting in ways those reviewers tended to underemphasize. Footage of mechanized chicken slaughter sits alongside footage of Tibetan monks. A weapons assembly line is intercut with a Filipino prisoner choreography. The juxtapositions are not commentary. They are diagnosis.

Fricke is using the resources of cinema to do what only cinema can do at scale: hold dissimilar images in adjacency long enough that their structural similarity surfaces. The viewer who lets the film operate on them — without resisting, without narrating internally — receives the teaching the film is built to transmit.

The film's most discussed passage is the assembly line montage in the second hour. Chickens are sucked through tubes. Pigs are processed at unimaginable speed. Workers in identical uniforms move at the tempo set by the line. Cosmetic surgery is performed in adjacency to plastic doll manufacture. Sex dolls are sculpted with reverence indistinguishable from religious iconography.

Fricke is not making an animal-rights argument. He is making a structural argument. The same care, the same precision, the same rhythm appears in the meditation halls and in the slaughterhouses. The hand that places the sand grain on the mandala and the hand that wires the bomb at the weapons plant are doing the same operation at different points on the wheel. Both are absorbed. Both are skilled. Both are unaware of the larger pattern.

This is the teaching that makes Western audiences uncomfortable: that the contemplative and the destructive often share form. The discipline that produces the monastery also produces the factory. The attention that produces the icon also produces the sex doll. The wheel does not care which use it is put to. The wheel turns because attention turns it. The film refuses to moralize. It documents.

The viewer who arrives looking for villains will struggle. The film does not name them. The viewer who arrives looking for heroes will also struggle. The film does not nominate any. What it offers is the structure underneath both categories, indifferent to which side the viewer prefers.

Samsara is not a film one watches once and remembers as content. It is a film one undergoes and carries in the nervous system afterward. The images recur. The chicken-suction tube recurs. The geisha's painted face recurs. The Filipino inmates dancing in synchrony recur. The sand mandala being swept into the river recurs. These are not images one chose to retain. The film installed them.

What it transmits is the operational presence of samsara as actual condition. Most Western viewers know the word as concept. The film makes the concept perceptual. After Samsara, the supermarket aisle reads differently. The traffic on the freeway reads differently. The own body, eating breakfast, reads differently. The wheel is everywhere the wheel was always turning. The film made the eyes capable of seeing it briefly.

Fricke is operating in the same tradition as the great non-verbal teachers — the koan, the contemplative icon, the temple dance. The teaching is not in language. The teaching is in the arrangement of perception. The film is what an icon looks like when it can move and the icon-maker has 70mm film. Watch it without your phone. Watch it on the largest screen available. Let the images do what they were assembled to do. The teaching will arrive without anyone having said anything.