The Baraka Effect

Cinema, Modernity, & the Metaphysical Imaginary

⊕ Contents
I. Non-Verbal Cinema
II. Beyond Words: The Sublime
III. The Sublime and the National
IV. A Cinema of Transcendence

Martin Roberts
Society of Cinema & Media Studies (SCMS) conference, Philadelphia, 2008

The group of films commonly known as non-verbal cinema, represented by films such as those referenced here, continues to be one of the most much-maligned genres of contemporary cinema. Godfrey Reggio mentions that he was actually spat upon at the premiere of Powaqqatsi in Berlin, because of the film’s representation of third-world people.Ty Burr, “FILM; ‘Qatsi,’ Part III: Technology Triumphs,”The New York Times, 19 March 2000. Avowedly inspired by the comparative mythology of Joseph Campbell, Ron Fricke’s global documentary Baraka (1992), shot in 24 countries, appears at best voyeuristic, at worst neo-imperialist in its catalog of sacred sites and religious practices around the globe. More recently, films such as Jacques Perrin’s Microcosmos (1996) or Winged Migration (2001), or most egregiously, March of the Penguins (2005), appear to take the genre to new heights of global kitsch.

Cinema studies has largely chosen to steer clear of the genre, perhaps in part because of the overtly “spiritual” nature of many of the films which comprise it. As Scott MacDonald has observed,

Few words are more likely to cause consternation in recent generations of American academics than “the spirit” and “spiritual.” Whether in the context of traditional religion or in the more recent New Age context, admitting to a spiritual context seems to a good many educated people tantamount to admitting to a disease of the intellect.

Yet as MacDonald goes on to explain,

Nineteenth-century painters and writers made it a convention to see spirit in the landscape, to image New World Nature as God’s Eden, and to understand the advent of the machine (epitomized by the railroad) as a fall from innocence; in this century, however, a good many artists have used the quintessential aesthetic machine - cinema - as a way of tracking the spirit, of reaccessing Edenic moments within the camera and screening room, and within the machine of postmodern, transnational society (author’s italics).Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films About Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001): 352-53.

These cinematic artists include not just the avant-garde filmmakers whose depictions of the American landscape are the subject of MacDonald’s book The Garden in the Machine, however, but the filmmakers responsible for the Qatsi trilogy and Baraka, whose works are in many ways inspired by them. Discussing Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Reggio explains that the film was an attempt to articulate the contrast between the presence of a life force within nature and what he sees as the machine-like force of modernity:

[R]ather than seeing nature as something dead, something inorganic like a stone, I wanted to see it as having its own life form, unanthropomorphized, unrelated to human beings, here for billions of years before human beings arrived on the planet, having its own Entity. ... I was trying to show in nature the presence of a life form, an Entity, a Beingness, and in the synthetic world the presence of a different entity, a consuming and inhuman entity.Godfrey Reggio, interview with Scott MacDonald, in A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992): 390.

This animistic belief is at its most explicit in the his later work, the aptly-titled Anima Mundi (1992) [usually translated as “the soul of the world”] which seeks to discern the animating spirit of the world in a film punctuated by extreme close-ups of big cats’ faces.

Spirituality is also at the center of Baraka, of course, from the half-submerged Japanese snow monkey bathing contemplatively in the hot spring of its opening to the sequences of Buddhist monks, Sufi whirling dervishes, pilgrims at Mecca, Jews at the wailing wall in Jerusalem, burning funeral ghats at Varanasi, Balinese kecak dancers, or European cathedrals.

If the spiritual dimension of the Qatsi trilogy and Baraka has functioned as a kind of shark repellent for film scholars, however, it has apparently had the opposite effect on more demanding audiences. Reviews of DVD editions of the films on the Amazon.com website are overwhelmingly positive, and in 2001 a tribute website was launched with the title “Spirit of Baraka.”

It comes as no surprise to discover that Baraka and the Qatsi trilogy are usually located in the Cult section of video rental stores. The films’ cult status is also attested by the growing number of new movie projects more or less explicitly inspired by them. Some are remixes of the original films themselves which are distributed online; others are original works in a variety of formats, which have been screened at independent and experimental film festivals around the world. I’ll focus here just on the substantial number of works which reproduce one the signature techniques of the non-verbal genre: timelapse cinematography.

Reggio and Fricke didn’t invent timelapse, of course, and the technique itself arguably originates in the pre-cinematic experiments of Muybridge and Marey. Nevertheless, their films have been instrumental in the popularization of a technique which in American film up to that point had been confined to avant-garde films of the 1970s, such as Hilary Harris’s Organism (1975). As Reggio notes, since Koyaanisqati contemporary visual culture has become “inundated” with timelapse imagery, and is a staple of TV commercials and music videos. At the same time, a growing number of independent filmmakers around the world have begun producing timelapse work more or less explicitly inspired by the work of Reggio and Fricke. A particularly interesting body of work has emerged from New Zealand, led by filmmakers such as Steve Thomson and Richard Sidey.

Aeon (Richard Sidey, 2004).

So far as I have been able to establish, what I have come to call the Baraka effect originates solely from the developed rather than the developing world, with most of their producers being white filmmakers from North America, Western Europe, Scandinavia, and Australasia. While Africa, India, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America loom large in global documentary projects, there have been to date no African, Indian, Middle-Eastern, Asian timelapse movies, and very few Latin American ones. It is no coincidence that many of the filmmakers originate from former imperial nations, and their totalizing projects can arguably be situated within the longer history of colonial systems of representation and power documented in Mary Louise Pratt’s aptly-named work Imperial Eyes.

The question remains, however, of why, exactly, Reggio and Fricke’s films have proved not only so enduringly popular, and so influential: how have these films managed to touch and inspire their largely white, Anglophone audiences to the degree that they demonstrably have, regardless of the critiques of cinema-studies scholars such as myself?

Baraka’s promotional materials describe the film as “A World Beyond Words.” This non-verbal aspect of the film connects it to the notion of the sublime, an emotion which arises in the encounter with an object or phenomenon of such magnitude that it is literally mind-bogging, in the sense of being beyond the capacity of the human mind to represent it and of language to express it. The encounter with a sublime object such as the Grand Canyon is typically experienced as a failure of language: observers consistently describe themselves as struck dumb, rendered speechless by the scale of the object itself. The sublime has, of course, long been a subject of fascination to philosophers from Longinus to Burke and Kant, who famously differentiated between the mathematical and the dynamic sublime. The focus of David Nye’s book The American Technological Sublime (1994), however, is not these philosophical accounts but what he calls the popular sublime: the culturally and historically specific experience of awe provoked in American artists confronted for the first time by natural wonders such as the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls, or as modernity progresses, by what he calls the technological sublime: gigantic man-made artifacts such as the Golden Gate Bridge, the mushroom cloud of a hydrogen bomb, or the launch of an Apollo space rocket.

It is a pity that Nye’s book does not discuss the place of audiovisual media technologies in relation to the history of the sublime, for what we know today of the earliest reception of motion pictures and television suggests that they too were experienced at least initially as forms of the technological sublime. As the initial awe they may have caused has worn off, however, they have assumed their more familiar role as mediators of the sublime, offering vicarious experiences of sublime natural landscapes - the ocean floor, the summit of Everest, earth seen from space, the surface of the moon - available to only a small number of observers, or even inaccessible to human subjects altogether (the Mars pathfinder expeditions). In the domain of cinema, IMAX movies clearly constitute a contemporary form of what we may call the cinematic sublime, both in the scale of their projection apparatus and their equally gigantic subjects, which often show a direct continuity with nineteenth-century forms of the natural sublime.

Much of the appeal of Reggio and Fricke’s films, I would like to suggest, lies in their orchestration of such encounters with the sublime, in both its natural and technological forms. Many of the natural wonders depicted in the films are strongly reminiscent of the subjects of nineteenth-century American landscape paintings, such as those of the Hudson River school. Almost all the forms of the sublime identified by Nye are represented, albeit with some significant differences: for example, while their sublime includes the national landscapes and man-made wonders of the United States, it is no longer confined to these, extending to the boundaries of the global. In Baraka, as in many IMAX films, the planet itself becomes the ultimate sublime object. Small wonder, then (excuse the pun), that reviewers and fans of Baraka so consistently refer to being at a loss for words to describe a film which is itself “lost for words” in the face of the sublime objects which it assembles for our gaze.

The cinematic sublime in the films of Reggio, Fricke, and their imitators takes many forms. So far, I have identified around a dozen, including:

An example of what I call the ecological sublime, from Godfrey Reggio’s nonverbal documentary Anima Mundi:

Anima Mundi (Godfrey Reggio, 1992).

David Nye suggests that the sublime objects of the American landscape play a key role in imagined constructions of American national identity. While at first it might seem that the films of Reggio, Fricke, and their imitators move beyond this narrowly national framework into the domain of the transnational, I would argue that in spite of their global subject-matter, the national - whether American or other - remains a key referent of the cinematic sublime. The history both of panoramic painting and early travel cinema are illustrative in this regard. As is well known, both panoramic painters in the early 19C and Lumière camera operators a century later travelled the world extensively, gathering images of “the world” for audiences at home in a manner which directly anticipates the global cinema of Reggio, Fricke, and others. Accordingly, we may regard their films and those inspired by them as indicative of the globalization of a specifically American model of the technological sublime. Whatever their embrace of world cultures, their frame of reference remains a recognizably American one in the gaze they bring to bear on sublime objects around the globe.

This locating of the sublime object in the imaginary space of the national is also recognizable in non-American forms of the cinematic sublime, notably in the case of Indonesia’s IMAX theater outside Jakarta, whose three films shown in continuous rotation are all about Indonesia (interestingly, they were also produced by the Laguna Beach-based IMAX company MacGillivray-Freeman).See Martin Roberts, “Indonesia: The Movie,” in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds., Cinema and Nation (New York: Routledge, 2000): 173-88. The same is true of the New Zealand school of timelapse cinema, where the national landscape of mountains and fiords, as well as cities such as Auckland and Wellington, are the focus of attention. Collectively, these examples suggest a close affinity between constructions of national identity and the role of the sublime as a national structure of feeling: Indonesia’s IMAX theater literally sublimates Indonesia as a nation - its landscapes, its flora and fauna, its architectures, its cultural diversity - for its viewers and their guests; perhaps less obviously, the sublime global landscapes of Baraka, IMAX Everest, and other forms of the American cinematic sublime ultimately remain the discourses of an American national imaginary of the world, rather than suggesting the emergence of a transnational imaginary.

The anti-metaphysical trajectory of post-structuralist philosophy has not led us to look kindly on the unabashedly metaphysical cinema of Godfrey Reggio, Ron Fricke, and the many filmmakers around the world inspired by them. Perhaps it is time for a re-evaluation of their work. Arguably the most important unifying thread linking the Qatsi trilogy with Baraka and their imitators is that they demonstrably produce, for many of their viewers, through the cinematic sublime, an experience of transcendence which is both emotionally pleasurable and apparently necessary in a world of mass consumption and increasing sensory overload. Encountering the sublime, entering the realm of the sacred, becomes a way of stepping outside, at least for a short time, the future shock of global postmodernity. In some ways, this is not so very different from the experience of transcendence which the metaphysical systems known as religions offer their subjects. If it is easy to label it escapist, it is no more escapist than Thoreau’s retreat to Walden or the decision to enter a monastery. It is not surprising, in this context, that Godfrey Reggio spent fourteen years of his life in a monastery prior to making Koyaanisqatsi, nor that monastic traditions worldwide are such a subject of fascination in Baraka.

From this perspective, the film’s ubiquitous monks become allegorical figures of the filmmaker-himself, a transcendent presence in the postmodern metropolis.

Baraka (Ron Fricke, 1992).

“Transnational Geographic: Perspectives on Baraka”

Martin Roberts teaches in the Department of Visual & Media Arts at Emerson College, Boston. His publications include articles on world music, global documentary, subcultures, lifestyle television, Japanese popular music, and the books Michel Tournier: Bricolage and Cultural Mythology (Stanford French & Italian Studies, 1995) and Cornelius’s Fantasma (Bloomsbury, 2019). Email: martin_roberts@emerson.edu