Baraka Film Response

I personally enjoyed the film Baraka.  Baraka is a nonverbal film that was reported to use a $4 million dollar budget, where Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson with a three-person crew, took 14 months and 24 countries to make the film. The film is titled Baraka or "breath", because the images and the sequences of shots take one's breathe away.  Everyone in the world breathes, thus the movie displays the breath of the world and its breathtaking features and inhabitants.

I believe that the planetary view of the film express a critique of the cliche good and bad of the modern world.   The movie displays the "good" wondrous nature the modern world still holds.  The beauty of breath taking shots such as this one shot in Bali Indonesia portrays some of the natural wonders of the world.  Shots such as this give the viewer a perspective on the true beauty of nature, and that beauty doesn’t always come in human form.  This film counters many films that use action, people, and words to portray the life around us all.  This film brings us all around the world as we examine the far reaches of the world.  The opening shot of the movie shows us that the breathe of nature is everywhere.   The monkeys bathing in the hot springs create a sense of tranquility and peacefulness in the coldest and harshest climates of Japan.  Nature seems to become surreal in the monkey’s tranquility.  The cinematography is main item of the movie as camera work such as; trucking, panning, tilting, zooming, and many other techniques are used to take our breathe away.

While at the same time the movie displays a modern artistic view of the somberness in the poverty of the modern world.  The transitions are also very powerful in the movie.  After this scene the plot goes to a cemetery made of all white.  The editor maybe trying to convey the fact that poverty seems to be as somber as death, yet there is still lots of poverty in the world today. The use of music was also a key feature in this movie to convey the feelings the directors were trying to get across.  The music would add to the tone of poverty, majesty, or sadness throughout the novel.  Although it displays poverty, it also displays the joy that children are still able to attain.  I believe that the main point of the movie was to contrast the wonders of nature with urban life in the modern world.