Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2332 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-09-17
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Anamorphic, PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 92 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Baraka is a non-narrative visual poem addressing, according to director Ron Fricke, "humanity's relationship with the eternal." The title means "breath of life" or "a blessing" and the film unfolds into a tapestry of global images shot over 13 months in 24 countries, comparable to, but far more ambitious than Koyaanisqatsi (1983) which Fricke also wrote, edited and photographed. Like Bernardo Bertolucci's similarly meditative Little Buddha (1993), Baraka was designed as a powerful audio-visual experience, one of a handful of films made in the 1990s to revive the immensely cinematic 70mm process.

Filled with staggeringly beautiful vistas which are striking, rich in detail and immaculately composed, the screen is complemented by an immersive Dolby Digital soundtrack fusing natural sounds with a haunting world music score. (At one point composer Michael Stearns combines Japan's Kodo Drummers, a Scottish bagpipe ensemble and a Tibetan water music orchestra.) Baraka encourages the audience to think or be entranced, and depending on mood and circumstance it can enthral or bore. With its epic, trans-human scale, vast formal grandeur, depersonalised abstraction, startling juxtapositions and avowed ambition to be the ultimate non-verbal film, Fricke has created a visionary experience akin to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

On the DVD: Baraka is accurately transferred at the original 70mm theatrical ratio of 2.2:1, not as the packaging says as 2.35:1. The picture quality is superlative, with virtually no flaws and razor-sharp images. The Dolby Digital 5.1 sound is equally outstanding. The extras are presented at 4:3 with letterboxed clips, and being video based offer lower image quality. These special features play for approximately 25 minutes and, apart from the original theatrical trailer, are divided into three sections containing significant overlaps between the material. The "making of" documentary and the collection of to-camera comments from members of the production team are both interesting, but the behind the scenes location filming footage adds little substance. --Gary S Dalkin

Special Features
2.35 Wide Screen
16:9 Anamorphic Wide Screen
English
Region 0
Dolby Digital 5.1 English
Dolby Digital 5.1
Making Of
Interviews
Behind The Scenes Clips
Theatrical Trailer

Synopsis
From Nepal to Kenya, from Australia to Brazil, people try to cope with the changes that have altered their landscape, crowding them together and speeding up daily life. The film shows us these alienated people, but also images of traditions -- whirling dervishes and Tibetan monks -- that offer different, peaceful ways of existence. Shot in 70mm in 24 countries, this awesome musical and visual montage in the tradition of "Koyaanisqatsi" expresses the global existence of nature and man in the broadest sensory terms.

Customer Reviews

Jumble Of Images
You will either love this film or hate it. Although often compared to Koyaanisqatsi, there is a difference: that other film has a theme, that of the inorganic and organic world subject to human depredation and ever-increasing pressure. I liked THAT film very much. THIS film has no real theme. The word "baraka", often translated as "blessing", can also mean "spiritual structure", "spiritual force/strength" etc. It has been applied to both Gandhi and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The film appears to be trying to show the world in 90 minutes, an impossibility which has led to this self-regarding mish-mash of scarcely-connected images.

The images in the film include mountains, volcanoes, clouds, temples, Far Eastern factories etc. There is, inevitably (?) a reference to Jewish suffering (but no-one else's: not so many Russians, Germans etc became movers and shakers in the American film industry, I suppose)) during WW2, when is shown a couple of times, the exterior and interior of a labour or concentration camp in Poland (there are no subtitles but the locations are vaguely credited at the end); the brick-built accomodation blocks looking oddly like American social housing which I remember visiting some years ago in New Jersey. There are some stunning filmic images of Mosques and also some of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and what looks like a Greek Orthodox Church. It is noticeable that there are few European and Christian images of note in the film. The great mosques are shown, Jerusalem is shown, but not the great cathedrals of Europe. In reverse, there would be a film showing Chartres, Notre Dame de Paris, the great cathedrals of Russia, in short the great edifices of Christendom, but only poor little mosques or synagogues in dusty little towns. There is a heavy imbalance in favour of the non-European.

The problem is that the images tell no story, they are just there. This is arty-fartedness taken to an extreme: conceptually (though certainly not technically!) I could have made a film like this when I was 14 years old; most young persons of even average intelligence and creativity could. The idea seems to be that the whole will be greater than its parts. Unfortunately, the opposite is the case: this film is less than the sum of its components. A better film might have split itself into perhaps 4 or 5 parts, showing, perhaps Spiritual Life, Architecture (in all its forms), the other Great Works of Man, the Natural World, Animals, Plants, Works of Art etc...as it is the concept is flawed, it just does not work. At one point, the distressing treatment of day old chicks as they become battery chickens is shown, mixed with a speeded-up view of traffic, to show (?) the similarity between our lives and those of the chickens as they (and we?) head to our destiny? Very 1st year film school, surely? In fact, the once-novel, now hackneyed use of speeded-up film of clouds, cars, people, is overdone, to say the least. And so much of it says nothing: a Tokyo crowd speeded-up, mixed with a group of three Japanese schoolgirls just standing around. "Hey man, Far Out!" (Not!).

In the end, the world (and Art, whether filmic or other) requires Truth and Will as well as Beauty: these are the Three Pillars. This film contains only what is or passes for the beautiful or visually striking. That is why, in the end, this film is meaningless and, indeed, pointless.

If you liked that try this . . .
. . . said the shop assistant to me when I bought Koyaanisqatsi.
I had never heard of the film but was so pleased that I took his recommendation. This is visually stunning and musically fulfilling.
The good news is that a sequel- "Samsara"- is supposed to be out in 2008

Baraka (1992)
The cinematography in this film is amazing. The world that is captured in the beginning shows calm and inner peace and beauty of wild life and nature .As the film progresses we how mankind has over populated and polluted the planet.

Devastating images of trees being cut down and car wrecks, bombs, war memorials show what we have done to this natural habitat.

I love this film, the sound track is amazing. The shots are fast moving and easy to watch. It is very captivating.

For all lovers of experimental film, this is a must see.