Baraka (1992)

CRCulver June 5, 2018

★ 10/10

BARAKA is a 1993 film, shot by Ron Fricke in some 24 countries, that is a sort of documentary on three universal themes: 1) the grandeur of the natural world, from the peaks of Everest to low deserts, 2) the oneness of the human race illustrated by juxtaposing almost identical shots from vastly separated cultures, and 3) the desire for a connection with something transcendent. Shot in 70mm film, watching the Bluray on a projector or a large-screen television offers one of the most visually stunning cinematic experiences around. There is no dialogue or voiceover, no characters, but the enormous amount of footage is presented here in a way that gives BARAKA a gripping dramatic arc, and it's a sequence that, on repeated viewings, increasingly seems the one logical way in which all this could have been edited. With unquenchable anthropological curiosity, Fricke identifies commonalities th…