When, atop snow-dusted mountain, you countenance the day's burning embers unfurling like crimson ribbons beneath a churning sky-scape of blushing clouds, doesn't it just make you want to... buy a car with optional four-wheel steering and an eight-speed automatic transmission? Advertising has co-opted just about everything for its evil schemes, especially the noblest and most sacred works of the creator. In fact, as suggested in Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, the natural world may now exist purely to support its all-encompassing technological counterpart.
So it's entirely appropriate that Koyaanisqatsi DP Ron Fricke's time-lapse cinematography should have wound up having such a major impact and influence on the world of commercials (particularly gas-guzzling car adverts) and multimedia corporate presentations. Things always look better when the clouds are soaring overhead like Frisbees.
Fricke's own chill-out classic Baraka shares its antecedent's time-lapse techniques and literally unspoken remit, though drops all pretence of coolly dispassionate neutrality to unreservedly endorse the spiritual, while simultaneously showing planet-wrecking industrialism the door via a roving montage of geopolitical images; a 'National Geographic'-style Rolodex of exceedingly pretty pictures through which the viewer is invited - or forcibly steered, through musical cues and pointed juxtapositions - to join the dots, appreciate the oneness of all things and draw sage conclusions about the state of the planet.
Unsurprisingly, these are of the 'factories = bad' and 'primitive tribes people = good' variety. In the style of Koyaanisqatsi, Baraka shifts from the natural world, with its indigenous peoples and religious ceremonies, to mass-market consumerism, urban poverty and the detritus of warfare, before returning to nature, sacred ritual and a final spectacular image of stars jockeying through the eternal firmament.
Just in case we should ever miss the point, the film settles into a repetitive groove of set-up - punch line. Beauty - horror. Or even horror - horror: the film's silliest sequence segues from the burning oil fields of Kuwait to a bunch of cowboys stoking the furnaces at an Arizona coal mine, then cuts to the ovens of Auschwitz. The skulls and bones of the Cambodian Killing Fields are but seconds away. So just to make that clear: that's an indictment of Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot and... those genocidal coal miners of Arizona?
Detail - reveal: here's some gorgeous shots of the Amazonian rain forest. And here's the poor little guy whose home the loggers are chopping down - a body-painted tribal child, peeping shyly through the heart-shaped leaves while an elder stares wistfully into the lens. These staged, static group portraits, also a fixture of Koyaanisqatsi, add further layers of artifice to the proceedings, but are undoubtedly meant to humanise the swollen masses of the Earth.
In fact, they have just the opposite effect and when focused on peoples of developed nations (ie any passing commuters or coal miners the filmmakers have stacked in front of the cameras like store front dummies), are practically employed as show trials: Behold, Exhibit A! Wretched bread-heads who've never so much as sniffed a peyote button!
Here they are again in fast-mo, leaving vapour trails of light and colour as they ping around train stations like pin-balls, or courtesy of an over-cranked camera, stagger down the road in slo-mo like zombies with briefcases. Only the priests, dervishes and hierophants of whichever denomination apart from Christianity (crucifixes = bad) escape the transforming terror of the time-lapse.
In Baraka World, religion (the more esoteric the better) is unquestionably a Good Thing. Elsewhere, an Oriental monk walks ever so slowly down the pavement tinging a bell, while all about him, those harried pedestrians scurry to their offices like obedient little ants. Bad pedestrians! Scurrying is naughty. Work is wrong. Tinging is good.
On the subject of tinging, Baraka's doomy score isn't a patch on Phillip Glass' undulating masterpiece for Koyaanisqatsi, and those generic ambient drones often accompany markedly different continents as if the makers were concerned that introducing more indigenous music at appropriate junctures might be harder on developed world ears. Not everything sounds like Peter Gabriel meets Buena Vista Social Club.
We're on safer ground in South America with those ubiquitous pan pipes, and in Bali, with the jolly and percussive 'Ramayana Monkey Chant'. (Do our ears deceive us, or is someone really intoning the phrase "Chee-ky mon-key"?). The metropolis, a forest of skyscrapers, is a real jungle - judging by those pounding tribal drums. But why not introduce a blast of pop or R'n'B? Or, for that matter, intelligent drum and bass? The stuff city dwellers genuinely engage with and live their lives to?
In Don't Look Back, Bob Dylan suggests a 'Time' reporter would get closer to 'the truth' by filling the magazine's pages with a collage of "a tramp vomiting into a sewer. And next door to the picture, Mr Rockefeller... on the subway going to work". The fact the filmmakers have chosen photogenic images of Calcutta's 'untouchables' picking through landfill - as opposed to, say, Ivory Coast down-and-outs begging for euros on the Paris Metro - speaks volumes about post-colonial prejudices. We're back with the Romantics and their noble savages. Third world porn.
It's a shame Baraka is saddled with the old smug, elitist hippie pieties, because in most other respects, this is what the movies - at least IMAX - was invented for. There are places on this Earth that resemble the stuff of science fiction, and Fricke and his crew have visited pretty much all of them; crumbling moss-covered ziggurats crowned with a harvest of stars; parched desert landscapes beneath rolling, purple skies; and fantastical temples, home to exotic lizards with ancient shaman faces.
Yet the filmmakers aren't terribly interested in non-humans, aside from their cutely anthropomorphic uses. In the opening sequence, a crimson-faced snow monkey sits in a hot spring like an old man in a bath and looks plaintively around him, probably trying to figure out which rock that Middle-Eastern flautist is hiding behind.