轮回 Samsara (2011)

Samsara is a 2011 documentary film, directed by Ron Fricke and produced by Mark Magidson, who also collaborated on Baraka (1992), a film of a similar vein. Samsara was filmed over four years in 25 countries around the world. It was shot in 70 mm format and output to digital format.

The official website describes the film, "Expanding on the themes they developed in Baraka (1992) and Chronos (1985), Samsara explores the wonders of our world from the mundane to the miraculous, looking into the unfathomable reaches of man’s spirituality and the human experience. Neither a traditional documentary nor a travelogue, Samsara takes the form of a nonverbal, guided meditation."

They gathered research from people's works and photo books as well as the Internet and YouTube, resources not available at the time of planning Baraka. They considered using digital cameras but decided to film in 70 mm instead, considering its quality superior. Fricke and Magidson began filming Samsara the following year. Filming lasted for more than four years and took place in 25 countries across five continents. Three years into filming, the pair began assembling the film and editing it. They pursued several pick-up shoots to augment the final product.

Samsara was filmed in nearly a hundred locations across 25 countries over the course of five years. Some locations include: Angola, Brazil, China, Denmark, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Ghana, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Mali, Myanmar, Namibia, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and United States. 

This film shows the audience 25 countries during the 104 minutes, in which the historic Asian continent occupies a large proportion. The director delicately captured many stirring scenes and gradually guided the audience into meditation, which leads us to more deeply thinking about human nature. In the film, the eye contact is an important medium to convey emotion. The director unconventionally kept characters in the film staring at the lens, giving the audience lots of thinking and interpretation.

In addition, Samsara also reaches the audiovisual extreme in music and composition. The soundtrack is the key element to control the film rhythm and emotional grasp: when the film presents religious and natural scenes, the soundtrack is magnificent, leading the audience to calmly indulge in wise thoughts; when the lens goes over the noisy and prosperous city, the soundtrack suddenly accelerates the pace and pushes the original slight tedious rhythm to high tide by accompanying with electronic percussion. As for the film’s shooting, I think the photographer has developed the composition aesthetics to the extreme. Every frame is just as a beautiful magazine cover with using 70MM film to make its image color plump, bringing unparalleled visual shock to people.

Watching the film, I am mostly impressed with that performance artist who is self-mutilated by mud and brushes. His hysterical performances demonstrate the twisted and perverted psychological state of city people under the huge life stress. In this clip, the director inserted an expression of a high simulation robot before and after the artist, which seems like deliberately laughing at our “well-behaved” urbanian.

All in all, Samsara is a film that is able to change the worldview of audience. Some ones may become vegetarians after watching the film; some ones may consider arranging a journey around the world; while some ones may want to be volunteers in a third world country, and so on. This does not mean that Samsara is a brainwashing film, on the contrary, Fricke do not impose his own view on the audience at all. What he does is just to broaden audience’s horizon through videos and leave them thinking about all the things in the world, which is also the greatest point of the film.

影片在104分钟的时长里带着观众游历了25个国家，其中历史悠久的亚洲大陆占据了很大的比重。导演细腻的捕捉到了许多震撼人心的场面，并把观众逐渐带入到冥想当中，让我们越来越深入的去思考人性的本质。其中，眼神的交流是影片传达情感的一个重要媒介，导演突破常规的让影像里的人物凝视镜头，给观众带来了多方面的思考和解读。

此外， Samsara 在配乐和构图学上也到达了视听的极致。影片的配乐是控制电影节奏和情感收放的关键元素，比如当电影在展现宗教和大自然的场景时，配乐显得大气悠长，让观众平静的沉醉在哲思当中，而当镜头进入到恬噪浮华的城市上空时，配乐顿时加快节奏，并伴随着电子打击乐把一开始略显沉闷的节奏推向高潮。至于影片的摄影，我觉得摄影师把构图的美学发挥到了极致，每一帧画面都好比精美的杂志封面，给人带来无比的视觉震撼，并且70MM的胶片使得的画面的色彩非常饱满。

在观看途中，给我映像最深刻的是那个用烂泥和画笔自残的行为艺术家，他歇斯底里的表演展现了城市人在巨大生活压力下产生的扭曲变态的心理状态，在这个片段里，导演前后插入了一个高仿真机器人的表情，似乎是有意在嘲谑我们这群循规蹈矩的城市人。

总之，Samsara 是一部可以改变观众世界观的电影。或许有些观众在看完影片后会决定成为素食主义者，或许有些观众会考虑安排环游世界的旅程，或许还有的观众会产生前往第三世界国家当志愿者的想法等等。但这并不是说 Samsara 是一部洗脑的电影，相反 Fricke 完全没有把自己的观点强加在观众身上，他所做的是用影像拓宽观众的眼界，让我们观众自己去反思世间的凡凡种种，这也是这部电影最伟大的地方。