The film's name, Baraka, is derived from Sufism, an Islamic mystical order that has multiple meanings: blessing, essence, or breath. Sufism has also appeared in the movie, and it is this sect that uses rotation as its cultivation method (it is said that a generation of Sufism masters became enlightened after 36 hours of rotation).
The director of the film, Ron Fricke, was the director of photography for the 1982 film Unbalanced Life, and he is very good at shooting time-lapse and large-format photography.
The film is strung with different photographic clips by smooth background music, recording the different natural and cultural scenery of 24 countries on 6 continents. If it is just like a photography exhibition, the same photographic fragments are put together, it is not enough to leave such a huge ripple in the audience's psychology. The reason why a movie is a movie is that it has its own subjective editing techniques to manipulate our emotions, connect different pictures in series, and implant some ideas that we did not have in our hearts, so as to achieve the director's purpose.
Imagine that we walked into a photography exhibition. Different exhibition halls may have different themes of photography. The first exhibition hall is religious ceremonies, and the second exhibition hall is geographical scenery... After we walk around, we may feel emotional The allure of photography is the beauty of everything, but without too many emotional swings. But this movie, with its well-designed montages and gripping music, swayed our emotions, and even when it ended, my mood was very mixed. Especially for an atheist like me, after reading it, I don't know where to find peace of mind. Confusion, sadness, fear, awe, if you don't believe in gods, how can you explain the chaos and order in this world?
Here's an example to illustrate the effect of clipping:
Take the Japanese hot spring scene at the beginning of the film as an example. In the picture, we see a close-up of the head of a monkey, which lasted for half a minute. The picture itself doesn't have much to interpret. The monkey's face is in the middle, the heat of the hot spring envelopes him, and the hair on the top of his head is clearly waterdropped. And just like that, we were forced to stare at its face for half a minute, and before we knew it, we had begun to develop an emotional bond with the monkey. We began to seriously think about what the monkey was thinking and how the monkey's body felt...
Just when we were immersed in this moment in the monkey's life, the picture turned into a spinning starry sky. The monkeys are obviously soaking in the hot springs during the day, but the director insists on intervening at this time to let us watch the stars and the night sky change. This one inserted into the shot immediately opened our minds. The mysterious starry sky has too many symbolic meanings, and when the audience involuntarily associates it with the monkey, the monkey also becomes mysterious.
The camera cuts back to look at the monkey's face. At this time, when we look at the monkey, we have an inexplicable sense of awe. Especially in the second half, in the clips chosen by the director, the monkey seems to close its eyes and rest, like meditating, like contemplation, it is immersed in this moment of life, maybe more immersed and focused than any of us, maybe more than any of us. People are getting closer to themselves. Whether it is to look at the starry sky first and then the monkeys, or first look at the monkeys and then the starry sky, it is not as good as this monkey->starry sky->monkeys.
Back to the film, the ultimate purpose of the film is to make readers think about it in the form of a documentary: What is the world we live in?
At the beginning of the film, we see a religious-themed montage. The morning mist shrouded the quiet Durbar Square, the quiet ancient Pashupati Temple, birds flew over the temple, people cleaned, prayed, and made pilgrimages. All the rhythms were so calm and natural. Similar black attire in different images is solemn and solemn, and the spotless brick face resembles the state of mind of a prayer.
We see monks in Lhasa, Tibet, praying by candlelight, their faces buried in the shadows, and the next shot suddenly changes to the fires in Kuwait's oil fields during the Gulf War. In this world, some people pursue inner peace in the light of candlelight, and some people write the greed and violence of human nature to the extreme in the raging fire. Can religion really save us from sin?
Do we deserve this magnificent, all-encompassing world?
California waves carve heaven’s gates in the rock, and Bali’s layers of green are dreamlike. The natives of Bali dance in a unified way. After escaping the fate of being colonized by Europe, they were able to continue this traditional ceremony between the mountains and pray for the blessings of all beings under the volcano. The billowing sea of clouds seems to devour the world, and it is not clear whether it is the world or the heaven. The sky is changing, only the mountains, rocks and trees remain unchanged. Sunrise and sunset, our existence is so short-lived that we don't live as long as the monitor lizards on Colorado Island, but our ancestors bloomed in different ways around the world. Before the arrival of industrialization, capitalization and globalization, how did we survive in the primitive and green. The mysterious patterns on the Indians' faces, a row of life-bearing abdomens, and exposed lower bodies. They shake their bodies, dance and sing, celebrating life and death.
The magnificent waves of these paradises were finally broken. Thunder bursts, intertwined with the sound of the rumbling lumberjacks, and a big tree fell with a bang. No matter how beautiful human desires are, the reality is as painful as it is. The world is not all beautiful. Do you want to be free, those who live in Brazil's slums, in crowded, sweltering brick houses, looking out at the world through their windows? Are the people who live in the cubicles of dilapidated apartment buildings in Kowloon, Hong Kong any different from the souls who live in the layers of cubicles in the cemetery?
In the subway, on the street, on the escalator, people are in a hurry, and the factory floor is full of people like machines. These people who can't see their faces in the time-lapse photography, with the continuous drumbeat in the film They moved, and after looking at them for a long time, it seemed that they no longer felt that they were human. But until the director began to intersperse clips of eggs and chicks in the editing factory, the intertwined images of people and chicks overlapped in our minds, and it seemed that humans and chickens were not fundamentally different. Society is like a giant factory, imposing social ideas and capitalism on our heads and transporting our bodies from one destination to another, with no chance to stop and rest.
Child in the jungle, when you walk out of this green
What will it become?
There is much more pain in the world than the loss of freedom, and we often forget that we live in a society with huge wealth and class gaps. In times of peace, there are still so many poor, homeless and prostitutes, and in times of war, the powerful can even decide the fate of a race. When the camera swept over the shoes and skulls of the survivors of the WWII concentration camps, thinking of the pious beauty I saw in the first half of the film, a deep sense of powerlessness and absurdity swept me, maybe this is the real world. The persecution of man against nature, the persecution of man against man, the tragedy that man cannot escape, cannot be erased in history and will be repeated in the future. Tiananmen Square, the Pyramid, symbolizes the supreme power possessed by some people - they require all beings to respect leaders who have no reverence for life, and to believe in people who regard themselves as gods. Faith brings different people together, and also makes different people kill each other.
At the end of the film, people wash away the mud in the Ganges River, maybe they are washing away their sins, cremation their relatives in the Ganges River, the eyes full of tears in the close-up, perhaps the only scene in this film that records the strong emotions of human beings . This kind of emotion is the only thing common to human beings with different beliefs. They pray to different gods, but their prayers look the same, their sincere beliefs, and their heartfelt wishes.
Perhaps after watching this film and seeing the beauty and grief of the world, you will want to seek religious solace and seek inner peace like those who pray. Or, you may want to give up the comforts of religion, because most of the woes in this world are not looked down upon by the gods. But no matter what you are, you have gone through this kind of thought journey, which shows that the director is successful. The billowing sea of clouds and the afterglow of the setting sun, the director wants to praise these jumping, spinning, and immersing in the life of the moment at the end. The most important thing is to feel the feeling of being alive when they jump and fall, turn every moment, breathe and breathe.
Heaven and earth are dark yellow, the universe is prehistoric.
The sky is black, deep, mysterious, the supreme force of nature.
The ground is yellow, nurtures life, has temperature, and is where we live.
The sky covers the ground, like a total solar eclipse. Despair overshadows hope, but hope still has the edge of light.
I can only bless this chaotic and dark world.
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