Religious Philosophy Baraka: A Film

Religious Philosophy

Baraka": A film review and meditation on the role of the sacred in art -- the art of filmmaking

Humanity has long used art as a vehicle of sacred expression. Art often depicts images in the form of pictures and iconography that are deemed religious by a particular faith community. Architecture creates religious structures designed for worship. It demarcates sacred spaces, often away from the natural world, as well as in nature. Even the act of making art itself can be deemed sacred, as when singing in a choir -- or perhaps when making a film. But a pantheistic, rather than particularistic view of the world is revealed in the modern cinematic silent classic of "Baraka" (1992). Nature is religion, in "Baraka," and art is used to highlight this fact.

Seeing the film "Baraka" has alternately been described as a meditation on the planet, a triumph of art over McCulture, and a tribute to the plurality and diversity of the planet. The film takes place in silence, except for its accompanying score. It shows a series of radically distinct juxtaposed images across the world. Some of the images "are as ordinary as the traffic in Manhattan. Some are as awesome as a solar eclipse. Some are as desperate as the tribes of scavengers scuttling like crabs over the garbage dumps of Calcutta" (Ebert, 1993). Some of "Baraka's" scenes are of human life; some are of the animal kingdom. Some are of poor, like the Calcutta natives, other images are of the wealthy like New Yorkers on the street. The film is a tribute to the diversity of the planet. It is like a water drop of human ecology and life on a Petri dish, and the minute details of earthly functioning are examined. It was shot in 24 countries on six continents over a stretch of 14 months (Hinson, 1993).

Artistically, the film's legacy can be traced back to "Koyannisquatsi" a 1983 film that used time-lapse photography to show clouds "racing across the desert, and crowds of people dashing madly about the caverns of big cities" to show the swift passage of what we think of as a long period of time and the ant-like existence of human beings in urban environments through visual, cinematic metaphors (Ebert, 1993). While sacred art often elevates the human form, "Baraka" shows art can just as easily reduce the role of humanity in its depiction of the finitude of human existence. In the film, the entire earth is paid tribute to, not a single species or even a single aspect of existence, one reason that the film reinforces pantheistic ideals, the worshipping of all things upon earth and the earth itself. In terms of its philosophical intentions, it shows respect for humanity, without privileging humanity. "The filmmakers have captured a compelling record of dramatic and spiritual moments as well as other scenes which give us pause to wonder about the fate of the planet and its creatures" (Brussat & Brussat,1993).

One response to the movie at the time of its release was: "Baraka tries to make the argument that there is no single cultural legacy but rather all aspects are important" ("The Movie Baraka as Evidence of a Human Cultural Legacy," Anthology of Ideas, 2006)

It might be added, it suggests that the human legacy itself can only be understood as important and valid if it is taken into consideration holistically, rather than piecemeal. No aspect of the world, even the parts seen as particularly sacred are superior to other aspects of life. This is may seem to contradict the centrality of religious images in the iconography of the film. Against humanity's fragility, "man has raised the bulwark of religion, and Frick's cameras show us man in the act of worship, from the Pope in St. Paul's to rabbis at the Wailing Wall, from monks in ancient temples to an extraordinary tribe of chanters who lean this way and that in time to their prayer, waving their arms like trees tossed in a storm, led by a man who seems immensely pleased to be in the center of such ecstasy" wrote critic Roger Ebert, upon "Baraka's" release (Ebert, 1993).

Yet the confluence of all of these different religious traditions, all striving for the truth, shows the impossibility of a single tradition to speak for the whole globe. The fact that all of these traditions make the same truth-claims and all believers believe with equal intensity, yet fall short of fully capturing the earth's majesty, calls into question the limits of human being's ability to find a comprehensive explanation for the earth. All the earth, even the weather, not simply the animate elements have power. Ultimately control is impossible, and even the filmmakers are limited in time and scope to how much time and geographical breadth they can capture in art.

The film's title "Baraka" is a Sufi word that means, alternately translated, "essence or breath" or "blessing" (Hinson 1993). This suggests that the film is supposed to capture the essence of life on the planet, and by showing a diversity of images, the camera functions as a kind of blessing upon everything that falls under the omniscient gaze of the filmmaker. "The film allows us to see the actual interconnectedness of all things in the world, and to appreciate its patterns and symmetries and its innate sense of balance and proportion" (Hinson 2007). Yet the one paradox to this pantheism is that cinema is indeed a man-made creation, and without cinema, no viewer could appreciate "Baraka" and its message.

Although the film encourages a holistic view of nature, and tends to reduce humanity's place in the universe, ultimately its aim is to move and to change the mind and views of its human audience in a highly specific and particularistic way. "They've assembled their images as a kind of 'guided meditation' -- as they have called it -- created for the purpose of examining 'man's relationship to the eternal'" (Hinson, 1993). This meditation does not guide the viewer outside of nature, although the viewer must leave nature to enter the theater to see it. However, it takes the viewer above and beyond the constraints of a human's eye view through the technology of cinema. It forces the individual to see the place of humanity from a god's eye view, even while it stresses the dependence of human beings on the vagarities of the environment and natural processes.