Samsara producer Mark Magidson tells TARA BRADYabout finding beauty in Japanese mohawks, Chinese transvestites, gangster funerals . . .
GET READY to anachronistically exclaim “Far out, man”. Last weekend, Samsara, the follow-up to 1992 wow Baraka opened in the US to rave notices and a record-breaking $38,111 per screen average. Box-office pundits were suitably impressed: America’s favourite film, The Expendables 2, managed only a comparatively paltry $4,001 from each site. But fans of the ravishing epic sequence were less surprised. Ever since Koyaanisqatsi hit cinemas in 1982, the collective appetite for cinematographer Ron Fricke’s bewitching travelogues across sacred sites has blossomed into a sizable, though chequered audience, drawn from the ranks of the deeply religious, the profoundly stoned and everybody in between. In the age of the manufactured cult, Fricke, a director who does not direct in the conventional sense, and his producer Mark Magidson have marshalled a genuine two-decades-in-the- making community into being.
“Ron and I started with Chronos back in the early 1980s,” recalls Magidson. “It was an IMAX feature but in those days IMAX features were limited to 30 to 40 minutes in length and a very specialised audience. So when we finished we wanted to take this non-verbal filmmaking to a global scale to show the interconnectedness of life. We started prepping for Baraka, a feature-length project, and that took five years to shoot. Then there was a gap – because these films take up so much of your time – and we continued with Samsara which we started in 2006.
The cult of Baraka has taken almost as much time to blossom as one of Fricke and Magidson’s international shoots: “People forget that Baraka was only a modest boxoffice success when it was released theatrically,” notes Magidson. “It started out slowly but it has grown. I don’t know what the primary demographic is. But with Baraka we have a huge campus following. Many of the kids who watch it were born after the movie came out, but it’s still something they see on DVD and BluRay. We travel all over the world, and everywhere we go, people know the film. It’s the kind of film-making that addresses the individuality of humanity and I guess a lot of people relate to that.”
Shot in 70mm over seven years across 100 locations and 25 countries, Samsara is a mesmerising “guided meditation” through Balinese dance, the grandeur of Versailles, the fervour of Mecca, the wall of Jerusalem, the art of St Peters Basilica, the cliffs of Galapagos, the Big Sur of California, the terra-cotta warriors of Qin Shi Huang and the temples and mosques of the planet’s most far-flung locations. The logistics are baffling. How on earth does one get a 70mm rig up to monastery in the Himalayas?
“It’s complicated. It’s a process. We have to work with so many people in each location. In some respects, technology made things easier for us on Samsara. The equipment package is very refined and efficient. The rig is a little easier to carry but it’s still pretty heavy and you have to work around that.The internet meant that researching was easier than it was when we made Baraka. The criteria for choosing images for the film is that it fits with the themes of circularity and interconnectedness and that the visual interest is high. We come up with a target list and then try to work out what is feasible to shoot.”
Did he have a favourite location from the hundreds on display?
“It’s hard to say. We visited so many memorable places. That long shot from a hot-air balloon travelling across all those fields of temples in Myanmar was beautiful and exotic. That was one of those magical moments that happens over filming.”
The Myanmar temples make for a stunning tableaux but many of Samsara’s most memorable sequences offer much more intimate views of religious, cultural and spiritual practice. Elaborate mandalas are crafted from coloured sand then destroyed in Ladakh; Ethiopia’s Mursi tribe pose in elaborate jewellery and white face paint; Balinese girls pose as a many armed deity. It can’t be easy persuading all these people to appear on camera, surely?
“Well, the people who know Baraka know that we’re going to be respectful,” says Magidson. “Nobody has to get involved if they don’t want to. But people, for the most part, are proud of their customs and are happy that we’re interested in filming them. And we do want to treat our subjects with reverence and respect. That’s really our entire motivation for making the film.”
A encyclopedic journey that takes in Japanese mohawks, Chinese transvestites, Filipino prisoners exercising in unison to hip- hop and gangster funerals, it often falls to Samsara’s exquisite sound design and the music of Michael Stearns, Lisa Gerrard and Marcello De Francisci to smoothly segue from one corner of the globe to another.
“We don’t use words so it’s all about image and music,” says Magidson. “Sometimes we do cut to natural sounds. But the music is our emotional commentary. It’s half the movie.”
Between spiritual ceremonies and anthropological marvels, the camera glides across spectacular natural landscapes such as Salt Pan in Namibia and Mono Lake in California. It’s tempting to see Samsara’s jarring use of profane industrial images – Chinese factory food processing, Indonesian sulphur mining – as a kind of Luddite manifesto nestling between sacred images. But the film-makers insist that these scenes are part of the grander scheme of birth and rebirth that lends the film its Sanskrit title.
“Im sure it’s not entirely free of ideology,” says Magidson. “But we do try to keep that in the background. We’re certainly not stringing images together to make a political point. We show you bullets and guns because that it part of a larger experience that we all live with. We’re not saying this is good or bad. We went into the Chinese food-processing factory and even though that was tough for us they’re fiercely proud of their clean, ordered workplace. We’re trying to make an experience that will not take the viewer to a place where they think ‘well I disagree with that’. We’re trying to avoid the intellectual and didactic. That would interrupt the inner flow that we want the experience to be.”
Samsara is out now
