Review of Samsara (2011) by Sil A — 01 Oct 2012

Take 99 minutes of images from around the world and string them together with a soundtrack of drums and chanting and other new-agey style music, and you've got Samsara, a new documentary about uhh... I'm going to guess it's about the world's interconnectedness.

It starts with a lot of kind of cool time-lapse shots of the sun moving across big rocks, the stars moving across the desert sky, a volcano erupting, that sort of stuff. Thing is, even though these images are cool for a while, I started to think that if I had to sit through 99 minutes of changing light and shadows on various surfaces that I might just lapse into a coma. Fortunately they mixed it up a bit just as I started eyeing the exit.

There's a whole section on factory farming featuring overcrowded chickens and cows and pigs, followed by scenes at the supermarket, followed by a morbidly obese fellow getting a vertical line drawn down his stomach. There are shots of sex dolls followed by shots of strippers. Hundreds of factory workers assembling things followed by hundreds of prisoners dancing followed by hundreds of troops marching.

There's a crazy interlude where a performance artist frenetically applies coat after coat of clay and fake features to his face. Uh...

There's a display of caskets shaped like race cars and airplanes and guns and then there's the funeral of a guy being buried in a gun-shaped casket and then there are people assembling guns and then there's a machine making bullets and then there's a man and his children posing with rifles. You get the picture.

I don't really know if this movie is trying to send messages (guns are bad?) or if it's meant to be just a series of impassive stream-of-consciousness montages. There are no words. There are no subtitles. Every person featured just stares grimly into the camera as if they're being filmed under extreme duress.

There are a lot of places I recognized or thought I recognized but for some reason, nothing is identified. Lots of moments of "Hey, I was there...I think". Or "I'd like to go there...too bad I don't know where it is." I wasn't saying these things out loud of course. I was by myself in a packed theater with a very loud breather on my left (who may have actually been asleep) and a woman who regularly emitted gasps of outrage on my right (so we'd all know how opposed she is to ill-treated chickens).

A long time ago, I saw a movie called "Koyaanisqatsi" that used time-lapse photography to show cars zipping thru cities and people flying thru revolving doors and I was thinking that certain scenes in this film are a total rip-off of that one until I just looked it up and discovered that they were both made by the same guy. So basically, the guy is ripping himself off thirty years later.

This movie isn't completely without merit in the sense that it has lots of very interesting scenes, like this group of Tibetan monks making an elaborate picture out of colored sand. Some of the segments remind me of the sorts of cool YouTube clips that might get forwarded around. In fact, I think I've actually seen a clip of those dancing prisoners before, only on YouTube they performed "Thriller".

Whatever the director was going for in this movie, I can definitely say I didn't get it. I just looked up the word "samsara" and it means "the cycle of death and rebirth to which life in the material world is bound". So there you go. For me it was more like a frustrating series of independent images from around the world which have been stripped of all identifying context. Obviously it was the director's decision not to provide place names, but based on the number of people around me reading the list of filming locations as the credits ran, I'm sure I'm not the only one who viewed this as more of a travelogue than some spiritual cycle of life mumbo jumbo.