Occasionally, I just want to sit down and watch a film, any film, as long as it fits into a specific genre. I might say "I'm in the mood for a comedy" or "I could go for a kick ass Sci Fi right now", and then I walk over to the wall o' film and find exactly what I am looking for to whet my appetite. As the clock struck midnight and a new day began, I realized what I was looking for at the moment. I didn't want to laugh, I didn't want to solve a puzzle, hell, I didn't even want to try to follow a plot.

I just wanted to see something beautiful.

My second viewing of…

Not necessarily so different from his more recent Samsara but equally as effective, Ron Fricke holds up a mirror to reflect back a meditative view on the world around us. Its non-judgemental approach allows you to pick and choose the elements that mean something to you, morphing everyday practices into a eye-opening moment.

There is a sense of narrative to the construction of the images, rather than complete randomness. The underlying theme appears to be our connection with nature and vice-versa, a spiritual essence that Fricke is attempting to capture. Like some sort of visual poem we are guided through cathedrals and temples, hidden tribes and busy metro systems.

It allows us to take a step back from the day-to-day…

In order to start with my Baraka review, I definitely must make myself clear with the following point: My evaluation standards for a film are completely different from those I have for grading a documentary. Since both belong to totally different categories, documentaries can't be really considered as movies. In fact, a documentary is a genre itself. Whereas films are useful for narrating a particular story, being either original or based in any bibliographical or artistic source (including autobiographical portraits), through acting, directing and a prior screenplay, the magic of documentaries come directly from the fact that they represent a small portion of reality of a small part of the world seen through the eyes of a director. There is…

A classic anthropologist’s wet dream caught on tape, in very high definition. Baraka is just over ninety minutes of stunning photography, capturing Earth’s extremes in terms of nature, but more prominently in terms of cultural diversity. For a movie disembarking from that premise, it is a bit awkward to see North America relatively underrepresented and Europe basically absent (I think I counted one short shot in a French cathedral, but that is about it). Director-writer-editor-cinematographer Ron Fricke is clearly more concerned with trying to achieve a profound exhibition of cultural exceptionalism, in which the extraordinary and the peculiar are (wrongly) displayed so as to speak for a truer, but less spectacular, national image. This National Geographic account of countries is…

A very loving look at our planet and the nature that has evolved juxtaposing the humanity that inhabits it and our obsession with the technology that continually brings us closer together while further isolating us. It touches on things as simple as a snow monkey relaxing in a natural hot spring and as complex as the aftermath of a Holocaust.

“Guided meditation” is how director-cinematographer-editor Ron Fricke refers to this at one point in the making-of, and that’s really an apt way to put it. Without a single spoken word, this splendid imagery is really just a high-concept travelogue. The story is evoked from those images, the worldly score, and the sometimes abrupt but never thoughtless editing. Everything has been…

Great:

This is a narration-less documentary with no "characters", dialogue or narrative to speak of so I admittedly went into this expecting it to be boring but boy was I wrong. This is probably one of the most gorgeous movies ever made, the visuals combined with the soothing music can really put you into a sort of trance. It features a whole range of different environments, people and scenery, plus it cuts from indigenous to industrial life, so this prevents the film from getting visually stale.

And those time-lapses are incredibly impressive as well. They're quite frequent in the film and to do so many of those while smoothly moving camera on 65mm film is insane. Can't imagine how expensive…

Baraka is a film about transcendental thought, devoid of language, inductively drawing links between humans and the world around them. In an even stranger sense, the film even offers the possibly that, yes, perhaps animals think too, without saying a single word. The entire film has not one line of dialogue. It goes in this canon of films that include “Koyaanisqatsi” and “Samsara” (both shot by Ron Fricke) that might be dismissed as nature porn, when in actuality they are manifestations of thoughts, ideas, and feelings that only a god might know the truth of. The film’s opening shot, for instance, immediately separates this film from others. It features in close-up a primate standing in a pool of water as…