Saturday, February 20, 2010

On Seeking a Universal Cultural Perspective: Baha'is like Baraka


For Movie Night last Wednesday in the Pierce Penn Baha'i community, Tony chose to show Baraka. I haven't seen the movie, but Rocky really liked it. -gw


Baraka (1992) is a non-narrative film directed by Ron Fricke ... of various landscapes, churches, ruins, religious ceremonies, and cities thrumming with life, filmed using time-lapse photography in order to capture the great pulse of humanity as it flocks and swarms in daily activity. ... In addition to making comparisons between natural and technological phenomena, ... Baraka searches for a universal cultural perspective: for instance, following a shot of an elaborate tattoo on a bathing Japanese yakuza mobster with one of Native Australian tribal paint. The movie was filmed at 152 locations in 24 countries:... It contains no dialogue. Instead of a story or plot, the film uses themes to present new perspectives and evoke emotion purely through cinema.


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1 comment:

Trace said...

Please make time to see Baraka. It is beautifully filmed in very high quality, cutting edge technology for the time. It is a chronicle of the planet at that moment in time, showing the beauty of the natural world and human civilization: monkeys bathing in Tibetan ponds, rainforests, a village in India; but it also records the horror of civilization gone wrong- the burning oil-fields in the middle-east, the death-camps in Poland and other excesses and derangements. An educational spin on watching it, is to then try to identify what it is you are viewing. Of course the internet is very helpful in that regard.

(Trace Dreyer, Baha'i in El Salvador, Central America)