Baraka I
Kerstin Schaars
One can enter a zone of becoming with anything, provided one finds the literary or artistic means of doing so. –Gilles Deleuze.
“Baraka,” a ninety-minute film by Ron Fricke was released in 1992. Shot on 70 mm film and covering six continents, “Baraka” collects, cuts and put into sequence a series of images of rivers, forests and cities. One watches human bodies at work, in prayer, washing, dancing, grimacing and burning. Imbedded into this sequence are images that gesture to man-made horrors. The director of “Chronos,” Ron Fricke gathers not only images but also the various speeds of mechanized and natural sound, and adjusts them to create a non-verbal, sound-full flow of cinema. At times, this sound-full flow becomes music. This cinema-scape—a part of which is a sound-scape between a selection of natural sounds and music provided by Michael Sterns—pulverizes whatever is familiar of this world. Put succinctly, the film pulverizes however the world is familiar. It creates in its stead a brightly simple new alliance between image and planet. The open whole of “Baraka” creates of the world new alliances among sounds and images: new alliances between images of bodies, plants, fire, water and air.
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This then is the material set before us.
Or, this then is the material before which we are set.
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From Arabic, the word Baraka signals a blessing from God. Thus Baraka is more an event among bodies, forces and things rather than the status of a given form. In a different register, the striking force of art holds something in common with Baraka. Baraka can collect in a body, enhancing not exactly its quality of being, but perhaps more a body’s capacity for becoming. A work of art can create new alliances not only between sound and image, but between animal and vegetable bodies, industrial forms and the planet. Art, such as the film, “Baraka,” can ally with forces that need not be attentive to the human. Or, the attention given to a human “being” is less privileged than the experiment in seeing what can become of the human body. Thus this film creates such an experiment. It also keeps at the forefront the dangerous force of experiments that can produce horrendous outcomes. Indeed, part of what makes this film is an experiment that concerns disastrous, horrendous experiments, experiments that produce highly creative catastrophes, ones that pulverize those systems of judgment through which we read the world as they pulverize bodies. This is the gut-punch that comes via art: transformation is both creatively destructive, and destructively creative.
Art not only explores such horror, but also can become such horror. That is, art can becomes an experiment with no return. This experiment can lead to becoming more or other than what a human “is.”
Yet what does such ramblings have to do with the film, “Baraka”? A symptom of the experiment that is this film is the coincidental status of the human on a planet fast becoming transformed, eroded and potentially destroyed by human activity. If we take seriously Deleuze’s suggestion that “one can enter a zone of becoming with anything, provided one discovers the literary or artistic means of doing so,” one can create an entry into this film. Yet a gut-punch accompanies this entry. Once one creates an entry, there is no way out. Indeed, there exists no return. By this I mean that new alliances, created via artistic means, transform familiar forms and the powerful ideas, concepts and judgments to which they refer. In art, image can change without remorse. This includes the image of the human.
This film performs such change through the cinematic flow in-between images. I will gesture only to one flow expressed in the film.
A nearly aerial shot of a large open room in cigarette factory shows tens of rows, populated by hundreds of women, hand rolling thousands of cigarettes. This shot expresses and exponential increase in numbers between rows, women and cigarettes. Further, there exist uniform, indifferent gestures imbedded into this labor. Hundreds of hands follow precise, uniform movements where pinches of tobacco and slips of white paper are twisted into small cylinders on a wooden rolling board. Pulled from this scene is an alliance between the labor of cigarette-making and smoke. A businessman on crowded street smokes one cigarette. A face, a hand and a lit cylinder dominate a shot that has moves in slow motion. Yet a single hand and face do not ally to create an individual, or even a human subject. Rather, it is a face among many, a face among any face.
More than human labor or human consumption, what can enhance in force is fire. Following the cigarette sequence are images of burning oil fields and charred earth. These ally with the image of a glowing cigarette tip. Following are the images of funeral pyres along the Ganges river, where prayer, baths and laundry and final rites take place simultaneously. The pull between a single body (a body in prayer in the river, a body at work washing clothes) to the multiple repeats again, in this different register. A holy man has his head and face shaved before stoking fires. Corpses covered in bright saris slide unnoticed into the river—a simultaneously holy and practical Ganges—and children play alongside dead bodies. In all this activity, a last shot sends smoke across the various bodies in familiar gestures. This shot of a funeral pyre, with loads of burning brown wood piled upon a browning body, stops this sequence, and even perhaps ends this alliance. One sees a face among flames, its skin roasting. This sequence is less about the human and more about fire.
The difficulty for judgment in this experimental alliance is how the film does not have to give more or less credence according to the bodies involved. The cigarette women, the oil fields and the funeral pyres, the holy man and the businessman—all images are put to use to make this film. This is the striking effectiveness of cinema’s technique: images can be malleable according to the sequence created. Yet something of images is autonomous from this technique. Each image is both fragile and violent, transforming the next image and the previous by “undoing itself.”
The autonomous creation and destruction of each image troubles a cinematic sequence where one image must follow another. Put another way, each image is a singularly immanent expression that can be indifferent to the sequence in which we find it. A chick’s head can contort under it burning beak, but what appears to be a grimace, is also an immanent affect expressing brightness, flame and smoke. This is the qualitative aspect of an image, the affect of an image. This is how “brightness,” and contortion under flame is expressed. Each instance of immanence, that which makes each image, can ally with any other instance of immanence. Any image can ally or withdraw from any other image, and not even cinematic technique can fully control these alliances. These powerful capacity on the part of the image is how art creates zones of becoming. Our task is merely to find the entry into such zones.
For this reason I suggest there exists an Open Whole to the film, “Baraka,” just as there exists an Open Whole to Baraka. I work from the premise that there must exist an Open Whole to art. By Open Whole I suggest a work of art is a permeable totality where the capacity to change is infinite. Such capacity comes via the immanent autonomy of each image in a sequence of images. In order to be infinite, art’s capacity can never be fully actualized or even “possibilized.” Instead, the Whole of art remains powerfully virtual but with real effects. This virtuality transforms life: that is how a Whole is dangerously creative. To extend then the quote from Deleuze, the film, “Baraka” engages in transforming the Whole of lifeby any means necessary, especially if the means are artistic.
"Baraka," from Magidson films, is available on DVD.