5 - The world from the blink of an eye

By Amanda, Sandrine and David

Introduction

This week, our class watched a unique documentary that raised questions, altered views and most of all, surprised us. Samsara was a film that no one could forget. Microcosmos was an additional filmed watched that also, subtlety left us with a similar message that Samsara did. Both documentaries, though very different, used film editing to expose their message and did so in a creative manner. They are both universal films that need no language to speak and no words to hear. The striking images, guided through music, are what made us form and shape an opinion, a value and a perception of the world we live in today. 

 Samsara: the cycle of life

Samsara is a 99 minute documentary film directed by Ron Fricke that was released in the United States in 2012.  It is a movie that raises various issues such as violence, recycling, natural disasters and poverty. These issues make the viewers realize that life is an eternal cycle of birth, death and rebirth (which is the meaning of the word “samsara”) by showing them many snapshots of the world during the mid-2000s. No words were uttered during the whole documentary, therefore we had no choice but to communicate through images. As they say, an image is worth a thousand words. 

Essentially, the film starts and ends with the same scenes it opened with. However, they are altered. One of the opening scenes was synchronised girls showing their culture through movements. The first girl is scene with her hands are clasped, her eyes closed. The ending scene shows the girl opening her eyes and hands, inside her hands there are eyes that are opened. This can be viewed as a metaphor, that going into the film, the viewers had their own closed perception of what they thought the world was like. After visioning it, they were open to a whole new interpretation, their views were more cultured, their eyes opened. 

Her hands opened, with the opened eyes, at the end of the film.

Samsara is a special film for many reasons. It is filled with extraordinary images with no words, no actors and no interviews. The filmmaker spent five years filming twenty-five countries and made us discover a hundred locations. We get an insight on many different cultures and ways of life which makes us reflect and relate them with our own lives. Samsara acts as an eye opener and makes us realize, through a spiritual quest of exploration, how little we know about the world that surrounds us and possibly how much we have lost connection with nature and the people around us. One of the best things about Samsara is that the lack of words causes the audience to watch the same movie but differently because we each interpret it in our own way.

 The filmmaker juxtaposed many different series of images together. The order of the images is very logical. For example, a scene from the film shows chickens being captured, then the following scenes progress to how these chickens become the food we eat, showing people at Costco. This particular scene is a great example of spatial relations, a dimension of film editing. The story of the chickens is developed by relating the scenes together.  We see that the events come in a chronological order that goes from specific to general. To accompany the images, there is music. The music is there to set a mood, it guides us towards the message of the film.

This film is a perfect example of the topic covered during the lecture this week: the editing of film. How images are juxtaposed and how the story is told is all part of what completes the movie. The distinctive traits of the images can be placed in a graph with a paradigmatic axis and a syntagmatic axis. The paradigmatic axis is the relation with the meaning of an image. The syntagmatic axis is the relationship with the images preceding it as well as the ones that follow it. Also there are four dimensions of film editing: graphic relations, rhythmic relations, spatial relations and temporal relations. We can explain these dimensions through numerous scenes observed in the film. Graphic relations are when images are juxtaposed in relation to their shape or their dynamic. For example, the images of tall buildings from one city to another show how many different places are somewhat related to one another. Rhythmic relations are when the filmmaker chooses the amount of time allotted to each image. He uses this when he takes the time to show the face of people or when he fast-forwards the traffic in the city. Spatial relations are when the images following one another are related to a point in space with similarity, difference or development of the story. An example would be when the slums are shown and to contrast, the filmmaker placed the following scenes of rich places. Temporal relations are when the images expand in time or the events are repeated. We can recognize repeated events when we see different places destroyed by nature. In short, these editing skills help portray the message. The important thing to remember about all of this is that when images are juxtaposed in a specific way, they tend to speak more than words can and it awakens our inner self and our interpretations as well. Kuleshov showed that principle very well when he juxtaposed the image of a man’s neutral face with 3 different images. The result of this experiment is that out of the same neutral face, we got 3 different emotions.

To summarize, this documentary was a film that had a strong impact on our minds. We can honestly say that our perception of how we view the world today has been influenced through this movie. A must watch!

The Kuleshov experiment :

An interesting interview with Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson

 

Microcosmos: the grass people

Microcosmos: the grass people is an 80 minute documentary film, produced by Jacques Perrin and directed by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou. Released in Switzerland in 1996, it was originally a French film, titled Microcosmos: le peuple de l’herbe and received numerous awards. This isn’t a typical documentary film about insects. We are introduced to the day-to-day lives of these creatures and their way of living. “Microcosmos’ means the microscopic (micro) harmonious universe (cosmo). From the literal translation, we can deduce that this film is an insight to the harmonious universe insects live in. 

    The film doesn’t have any actors, it doesn’t even have humans, nor does it have words, with the exception of a short narration at the beginning to set the scene. The documentary is accompanied by music that, similarly to Samsara, guides us through the film. Through specific micro-cameras, we are invited to observe the intricate yet simple life of insects. The images are viewed up so close that when the camera zooms back out, we see the reality: how their world is just a little place in nature. We see life on a different scale. An hour can be considered a day and a day’s worth feels like a whole season.

 Most of the time, we do not think about insects. We do not pay attention to them, their purpose, their daily struggles on life. To us, it is just a grasshopper that hops around, it is just an annoying bee that buzzes collecting honey, it is just a useless caterpillar that turns into a butterfly, and it is just a creepy spider on a web. However, all these insects are doing is trying to keep a life, find food, fight, mate, etc. Microcosmos is a film that allows us to discover the real world of the ants we see on sidewalks, of the bees we run away from and much more.

 Snails of beauty mating

On a deeper end, this documentary truly makes us reflect on our own life, and that raises the main issue of how we seem to have lost contact with the one thing that is the reason why we are living: nature. How? Observing the insects on how they live is a reality check. Through the movie, we can somewhat compare their lives with our own. They go day by day trying to survive along with the countless battles they encounter. They are in direct contact with nature, whether they use it to live; or whether they’re being dominated by it. For example, a scene in the film shows an ant drinking from a drop of water and another shows how one drop can shake-up a ladybug’s life! As humans, we also try to make a living daily. However, we take advantage of nature, we don’t take care of it. It is when we realize that we aren’t the only species in this world that it becomes a problem. Our actions affect what surrounds. It is the little things that to us, wouldn’t make a difference; but to them, changes everything. Another example would be an image showing a beetle trying to get a ball of dung up a hill. It encounters a little spike and we see how it struggles to try and get the dung off the spike. It isn’t even aware that it got caught on something!

The beetle struggling to get the ball of dung off the spike

          Microcosmos is like the samsara of the insect world. As read above, samsara is the cycle of life, death and rebirth. In this film, we observe how insects, such as snails for example, mate. Then, we see the birth of another insect. This juxtaposition shows the cycle of life, and reproduction. 

 

          Furthermore, we are able to apply the theory of film editing to this documentary. One of the dimensions of film editing used by the editors is temporal relations. This dimension describes the time of the events and how they are presented and developed. A scene in the film shows the birth of a bee. The scene is not more than a minute long, the editors made multiple ellipses to show the development of the bee’s birth cycle. Additionally, the film uses graphic relations. This dimension of film editing describes how transitions are related to the image’s shape, color or dynamic. A scene from the film shows a caterpillar on a branch. The following scene transitions to a butterfly on a branch. These scenes are juxtaposed together and we are able to understand that the caterpillar turned into a butterfly, without the need for the cameras to show it. We can observe throughout the film how, because of the way the editors made the movie, there isn’t really a need to show every single detail. Viewers can comprehend what is going on in the film and that is an advantage the film has over any other documentary about animals. Another example would be when we see the mosquito walking on water and the following scenes are focused on specific insects and their dynamic with water. These clips allow us to observe, through the dimensions of editing and juxtaposition, just how special these insect’s lives can be. Moreover, the sound also plays an important role. Along with the music in the background, we hear nature’s voice: leaves rustling, bees buzzing, wind blowing. 

 All in all, this breathtaking film captured a world we barely knew existed. Its form and structure guided us through to open our eyes and truly observe what nature has to offer. It made us forget about all the materialistic things in life, and helped us focus on something we have forgotten.  

Our thoughts:

Both Samsara and Microcosmos are unique documentaries with no words; they focus on breathtaking images. Their respective soundtrack guide us through to a conclusive message. What we concluded through the films was that we have lost perspective on the world that surrounds us. We are only interested and caught up in our own lives that nothing else matters. However, visioning these films was sincerely an eye-opener and made us think, form opinions and question life. As mentioned earlier in Samsara, we developed a spiritual quest. 

Samsara cycle

Before watching either of the films, we each had our own assumptions of the world. Whether it was where the meat we buy comes from or if insects fought with others to live. The realities observed challenged and questioned the way we perceived life. 

        Having such insight on the different ways of life from many cultures and many parts of the world, assumptions we had of the third world and our opinions and views about poverty, health, war and incarceration were altered. Understanding a culture and their way of life was brought to us under a new light. We saw many images that struck us and that brought us incite and knowledge to many different cultures and ways of life around the globe. Assumptions we had like viewing certain countries as poor and violent for example certain African countries were now brought to us under a different light.  We judge based on what we’ve heard or seen in the media and we aren’t really educated about life around us in the world. 

We were shown a whole new light on certain African countries and such beauty that weve never really seen before.  We saw breathe taking images of the environment of these countries. We live in a materialistic society we are not one with the environment we treat life forms miserable and we occupy ourselves with many occupations daily grasping the concept  and the purpose of life. Seeing these different tribes and people work together with the environment and see how important treating life forms to them are, shows us how we are not one to judge such a way of life. Even though we have different perspectives sometimes ignorant ones about these countries, we were able to look beyond that and understand that we were not in a place to judge based on stereotypes and opinions. We started to think about the importance of the environment and maybe instead of judging we should concentrate on making our lifestyles better and seeking truth than developing these stereotypes and assumptions.

         Walking away from both of the films, our perspective had changed, it was seen in a new light. When we see an ant’s hill, the scene from Microcosmos of the ants actually building their home will come to mind. Not only was our perception of the world altered, but we learned and grasped concepts we hadn’t seen before the films. For example, we were introduced to native cultures, to countries that are the extreme opposite of what we know, to a whole different microscopic world!    

It was interesting to discover that the movies had impacted us in such a great way, through pathos, appealing to our emotions. Numerous scenes in Samsara evoked many feelings, for example when we see that the people living in slums go through tons of garbage to find food is heartbreaking, and to think of the amount of food that we waste on a daily basis... Or when we see the striking image of a solider in a cemetery makes us ask why war is necessary? What is its purpose? Throughout both films we ask ourselves many questions that in the end, we find a general answer to all of them. 

The filmmakers used a number of effective ways to communicate their ideas, however, these ideas were not imposed upon us. It was through the guide of the filmmakers that we came to a conclusive message. One of their strategies was the obvious absence of words. Anyone from anywhere can watch either of the films and walk away with a similar message. They are universal and it is to the filmmaker’s advantage that the films can be such a powerful eye-opener. Another strategy used was the juxtaposition of the images. Discussed in detail above for both films, it is something that also guided us to conclude a message from a specific clip. 

           Watching Microcosmos and Samsara struck us as movies that share the same concepts, ideas and themes like the value of and the purpose of life as well as the importance of the environment. The Disney documentary film Earth directed by Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield and the documentary film, If a Tree Falls: A story of the Earth Liberation Front directed by Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman were movies that we thought of when looking at these ideas. Earth, a movie filmed based on the life of the creatures that share our planet, was a movie like Microcosmos that not only filmed insects but animals of every species, plants and nature as it is. We sometimes even forget that the planet we live on is inhabited by other organism and forms of life like us. We crave greed, money and power and we do little to protect our environment. In Samsara we see the contrast between our lifestyle and that of other societies. We can see under a new light the way we treat life forms and the way we live in a materialistic world unlike a world where certain people put great importance on the environment.  

In relation to Microsomos, the movie Earth made us think about a social event that we have today in our society, Earth Day, April 22^nd. The day we focus on environmental concerns and a day where we take the time to reflect about the certain ways to enhance our way of life regarding the environment and protecting it. It made us realize to a certain extent that although we inhabit the world and we are a main essence of it we as with other creatures inhabit it and we must do something to create awareness and importance to these life forms.

 The second movie If a Tree Falls: A story of the Earth Liberation Front is about a man named Daniel McGowan, who believed in taking action against people or companies who endangered the environment. He set fires to many facilities and companies to prove his cause and as a result he was sentenced to seven years in jail incarcerated in a maximum-security prison. This brought up the theme of how we focus on greed money and power instead of focusing on life forms. Someone who took charge and tried to make a statement to do something about the environment is now labeled a terrorist and is sent to prison. In relation to Samsara we identify key factors like that of living in a materialistic world and we start to really question what is important to our well-being, is it the environment or the on-going materialistic world that we live in.

Living in the North America, we share and carry many different ideologies, culture and lifestyles compared to the rest of the world. Certain messages in the films can related to our individual lives. To elaborate, we are college students who question if the society we live in is for the best or the worst.  We start to ask ourselves, wondering how badly we are disconnected with from nature, how far will we go until it is unbearable? 

Trailer for Disney's Earth:

Trailer for If a Tree Falls: A story of the Earth Liberation Front

Conclusion: 

Samsara and Microcosmos are two documentaries that speak through images. They are both unique, as documentaries aren’t typically made the way these were. They are perfect examples that explain the editing of film and its four dimensions. Both films have the ability to transmit a powerful message on how we view the world with one eye. Through the movies, we are open to a new interpretation of life and it teaches the viewers to be more aware of the world they live in; to not assume that they know best. In the end, we must all think about the consequences our disconnection with nature has on us, and on the world.