One of the best films I’ve seen this year is director Ron Fricke‘s Samsara, a wordless documentary of images that provoke emotions. The title is a Sanskrit word that means “the ever turning wheel of life” and to capture that life, the images that make up the 102-minute film were captures in nearly a hundred locations across 25 countries over the course of five years. The result is one of the most moving theatrical experiences I have had the pleasure to be part of.
Fricke and his production partner Mark Magidson have put together a film that touches on so many aspects of the human condition, our lives, the way we treat our world and those around us, religion, technology, what we eat, where it comes from and where it goes and it does all of this without a single piece of narration or on screen titles.
20 years ago the duo brought us Baraka, which I had not seen until only a few days aog, and whether it was the experience of seeing Samsara in 4K on the massive 70-foot screen at Seattle’s Cinerama versus seeing Baraka in HD on my television at home, the experience simply wasn’t the same. This is a film to be sought out and experienced on the largest format possible. While Oscilloscope isn’t releasing any large format prints when the film hits theaters on August 24, it was shot entirely on 70mm and you feel the size and scope of the undertaking with every breathtaking image.
To create the end product, the 70mm to digital conversion process required that each frame be scanned at 8k resolution. The resulting product is astonishing.
Today I have compiled a few videos exploring the film beginning with the first one below courtesy of Wired previewing a clip from the film presenting professor Hiroshi Ishiguro and his lookalike android. It’s a clip to be watched with the volume turned up as loud as your surroundings will allow and, for me, while watching exhibited both a promising and potentially horrifying future as man and machine are becoming more and more indistinguishable from one another followed by a sound we are all too familiar with nowadays, the clacking of the keyboard.
A second clip, which you can watch over at Gadling.com, is a peek at the aerial beauty you’ll see in the film, beginning with an image of the Burj Khalifa all of us are quite familiar with now due to its presence in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. This is a tiny sampling of the aerial photography in the film with some of the most breathtaking being a transition from the tribal world of Africa to nighttime timelapse sequences capturing city life all around the world.
Finally, some behind the scenes videos, two of which take a look at the music of the film which was envisioned by Magidson, Fricke and Michael Stearns alongside world-renown singer Lisa Gerrard, whom many of you will surely recognize from her lovely vocals heard over such films as Gladiator and Black Hawk Down. The track you’ll hear over the “Voice of Lisa Gerrard” video below is stunning
