Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Baraka
1992 · Ron Fricke · Baraka on Sightlines
Commuters crowd a subway turnstile. The crowd is a current, pouring through the gates. A few cuts later, newly hatched chicks pour along a conveyor belt at the same pace and in the same direction. Ron Fricke never says what the rhyme means. Baraka has no narrator, no title cards and no dialogue. All it has is the cut, the music under it, and you in the dark putting the two images together.
That moment is the easiest way into a film that can look like a screensaver to anyone who hasn't learned to watch it. It is a montage film in the oldest sense. Gilles Deleuze, writing about the Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s, described a dialectical montage: two shots collide and produce a third meaning that neither held alone. Commuters plus chicks don't add up to more commuters and chicks. They add up to a thought about what a body becomes inside a system built for throughput. Fricke learned this grammar from Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, whose rhyming of human and machine motion Baraka's factory and city passages openly quote. Elsewhere the collisions are quieter, graphic rather than violent: the geometry of a mosque courtyard set against the geometry of a computer chip, ritual repetition set against mechanical repetition. The film argues entirely between its shots.
The film has a second invention, and it is Fricke's own. For his 1985 short Chronos he engineered a computer-controlled camera that could creep across a scene in tiny increments over a long time-lapse exposure. In Baraka the frame moves while time is compressed. Clouds streak, stars wheel, and crowds flow like liquid. Deleuze would point us here toward a strange kind of perception. Most films see through someone, a character or at least a human-height witness. Vertov dreamed of a camera-eye freed from any human center, vision handed over to the machine, and Deleuze called that gramme: perception as matter registering matter. Fricke's rig is that dream built in metal. No person has ever seen a city breathe this way, because no person stands still for hours while gliding sideways by tiny increments. The world looks as if it is filming itself.
Watch what this does to the people in it. Under time-lapse, a crowd stops being individuals and becomes one moving substance. Deleuze's word for a collective rendered as a single affective unit is the dividual, and Baraka makes it visible: thousands of separate errands fuse into one tide with its own rhythm and its own mood. The flow itself has a name too. Deleuze called fluid, unanchored perception, the vision of currents and drift, the reume. Fricke's crowds read the way water reads.
Then the film stops and holds a face.
This is the counterweight, and it is where Baraka earns its title, an Arabic and Sufi word glossed as blessing, or breath. A monk, a laborer, a child, a tattooed face looks straight into the lens and the camera simply stays. These portraits descend from Powaqqatsi, which introduced the slow, dignified frontal portraiture of working people across the developing world, but Fricke pushes the stillness further. Deleuze described a kind of close-up he called the qualisign: an immobile face that doesn't act or even quite react, but reflects, and so expresses a single quality, contemplation or wonder or plain endurance. Nothing leaves these faces as action. The feeling stays in them, and in us, because the cut won't come to release it.
That is why the Deleuzian lens is worth the trouble here. Without it, Baraka can seem like a beautiful catalog. With it, you can see the tension the film runs on: two ways of seeing a human being. One is the dividual, people as flow, matter, volume moving through gates. The other is the qualisign, one person looking back at you. The film keeps cutting between them, and never settles which one is true.
It also explains the odd position the film puts you in. In ordinary cinema a character sees something and does something about it, and we ride along. Baraka removes the character and leaves only the seeing and the hearing, what Deleuze called pure optical and sound situations. You cannot act. You can only look and listen, at a burning ghat on the Ganges, at a smoldering dump where people pick through garbage, at the sites of genocide the film visits. There's a real ethical question in that. Is pure looking a kind of reverence, or a kind of distance? The film doesn't answer. It leaves the question with you.
Film theory has long split between two faiths. André Bazin trusted the long take and the unbroken real. The Soviets trusted the cut. Baraka belongs to both. Its frontal, symmetrical holds on temples and faces are Bazinian patience, and its crescendos are Soviet collision. Fricke shot and co-edited Koyaanisqatsi as its cinematographer, where image and score were locked together, and he carries that lockstep forward. Here music sets the tempo the editing follows. The structure comes from the 1920s city symphonies too: Berlin: Symphony of a Great City organized footage by rhythm and the daily cycle instead of by plot, and Rien que les heures used wordless cross-class juxtaposition to portray one city. Baraka applies the same method to the whole planet, in 70mm.
What it did to narrative is simple to state. It removed narrative and found that a feature-length film could still hold you, through tempo and association alone, as a tone poem in movements. Its descendants include Samsara in 2011, made by the same partnership. Its 2008 restoration, scanned from the 65mm negative at 8K, showed how much detail had been waiting in that negative the whole time.
So watch for the hinge. When a crowd turns to liquid, ask who the camera is now. When a face holds your gaze for one beat too long, notice that you haven't looked away either.
Concepts in play
- dialectical montage — Subway commuters at turnstiles are cut to rhyme with chicks on conveyor belts, and a mosque courtyard's geometry is set against a computer chip. With no narration, meaning is produced between shots, in the tradition of Vertov's rhymes of human and machine motion.
- engramme/photogramme (machine-eye perception) — Fricke's custom motion-control time-lapse rig, first built for Chronos, pans and tracks across long exposures so clouds streak and stars wheel, producing a vision no human center could have.
- dividual — Under time-lapse, crowds flow like liquid and individuals fuse into one moving collective substance, as in the commute sequence.
- reume (flowing perception) — Time-lapse renders crowds as liquid currents and clouds as streaks, so perception becomes flow and drift.
- icon of quality (the reflecting face) — Recurring near-portrait holds on monks, laborers, worshippers and children who look directly into the lens. The face stays still, and duration charges it with a single quality.
- pure optical and sound situations — With no dialogue, voiceover, characters or conflict, the viewer can only look and listen: the Ganges ghats, a smoldering dump with garbage-pickers, sites of genocide, all carried by a structural soundtrack of music and ambient sound.