As I was watching Baraka, and having my shit blown away by it, I couldn't help but think that director Ron Fricke had somehow seamlessly combined two disparate traditions. It's too easy to say that Baraka is similar to Koyaanisqatsi, especially since Fricke worked on that film. Actually, I was thinking of:
1: Goona Goona: I think it's fitting that Baraka is showing as a midnight movie at the Landmark Sunshine in two weeks or so. Bear in mind: I'm always bitching about how conservative the tastes of the Sunshine's midnight movie programmers are. I mean, I have a reason, OK? These are the guys that show The Goonies at midnight and they used to be the guys that showed A Boy and His Dog. This shit matters, ok?!
But Baraka is a good choice thanks in no small part to the exploitative heritage it comes from. Fricke's ideology and approach may be drastically different from the sleazy, pseudo-educational ethnographic documentaries that emphasized naked spear-chuckers, human sacrifices, dead bodies and tattooed/pierced skin.
But you can't have Baraka without that tradition: the footage of an ossuary, which is conflated with footage from a Holocaust museum and then a concentration camp? Or how about the images of a human body being burned near the Ganges, complete with a close-up of a pained look etched on a corpse's face? Or how about that shot of the same body burning where you can clearly see the body's foot burning, the flesh flaking off its bone? Or even the scenes of naked Amazon natives and their elaborate body art? If that's not the distant relative of Goona Goona and the Mondo movies that followed it, I don't know what is. Just look at the film's original tagline: "a world beyond words." Sounds pretty exotic, huh?
