Sand falls from fingertips. Colored powder piles up on the floor and becomes a pattern, and that pattern loses its purpose the moment it is completed. The film "Samsara" holds onto the time of that dispersal. There is not a single word of dialogue.
Released in 2011, the film was directed by Ron Fricke and produced by Mark Magidson. The two worked as a team on "Chronos" in 1985 and "Baraka" in 1992, and came together again in 2006 to design this work. Filming took place in 25 countries over five years, and the footage shot on 70mm film was transferred to digital. The two read the Sanskrit word "samsara" of the title as "being born, dying and being born again," that is, as transience.
The film is not a travelogue, nor a conventional documentary. The official introduction calls the work a "wordless, guided meditation." The audience is thrown in without explanation. Temple rites, industrial sites and abandoned buildings follow one another without subtitles or place names, and the work of drawing connections between them is passed on to the viewer.
The choice to erase dialogue determines the character of this film. When the viewer is not told which country's heritage this is, the subject cannot be sorted as knowledge and is instead grasped through the senses. The grain of stone, the sheen of metal, the sound of cloth brushing past, the regular vibration a machine gives off. To eyes accustomed to treating heritage as a list, this approach is unfamiliar, and for that reason it stays a long time.
The tension between preservation and use does not slip away on screen either. When hands performing a rite and hands handling a machine are cut to the same rhythm, tradition looks like a form of labor still being repeated now, beyond a relic to be protected. When scenes of ruins follow, the question sharpens. Why is one thing preserved and another left to decay.
The strength of the direction lies in contrast. Fricke chose juxtaposition in place of explanation, and the resolving power of 70mm makes that juxtaposition hold at the level of material rather than emotion. There are also images where the shooting itself becomes the purpose. In some scenes the image is so beautiful that it erases the circumstances of the subject, and the viewer stays with admiration instead of consideration.
Erasing words also has its cost. Heritage stripped of context becomes an image that could be placed anywhere, and that universality blurs the conditions each region has borne. The stronger the question mark, the further the answer is deferred outside the theater. "Samsara" is closer to a device that makes thinking begin than one that offers finished thought.
In the middle of summer, spending two hours without words in a dark, air-conditioned room is not a common experience. Once those two hours pass, the stone and iron beyond the information panel remain as a slightly different surface. When a screen with its explanations stripped away held the hand of the rite and the hand of the machine in one frame, was what the audience saw a world that is disappearing or a world that is still turning.
