Baraka Film Review

Today in class, we watched a film called Baraka. The film is shot in 24 countries and it shows the different cultures, geographical views, and social diversity in the 24 countries. This film was made in 1992 and took over 13 months to get the shooting done.

 



Foreground, midground, backgroundshot



 

high angle shot

In the beginning of the film, it felt like it was going to be a boring film to me, but it swept me off my feet. In my opinion, I never seen good cinematography in a film, maybe that's why it took over 13 months to shoot it. There was long shots, and in the majority of shots there was foreground, midground, and background. The shots weren't just fast edits, images were panned or dollyed. For example, when we saw shots of the mountains covered with snow, the shot was a dolly shot. All the shots were so interesting, I never saw anything so beautiful. In the shots, I saw a pattern, it was that all the shots were seen from high angles, or the camera would pan up to be in a high angle shot. Since this movie doesn't have actors or a plot, it didn't make sense to me. The shots would just come in and it jumps from one country to the next. Its hard to tell where each place is. The director of this film should have inserted captions so the viewers, like me, won't be confused. Another thing I disliked about the film was that some shots took forever. What I mean is that one shot would take about 4 seconds to pan up to the object than it would take 4 seconds on that image. This drove me nuts because some shots were so boring that it took really long to see the next shot.

Baraka means "breath", I think that this film was named this because Earth has many people of different cultures, religions, and social diversity. Everyone on Earth breathes and if all people stop breathing they will die. When everyone dies, Earth will die. I believe the point of this film is to show how people's different cultures and social diversity changes our planet.
After seeing this film, I learned many new messages from this movie. One message is that everyone in the whole world is living differently due to culture differences and social diversity. For example, Baraka showed how people sleep in Japan, how there is many cars in New York, and people in Nepal do rituals. Another message I got was that people shared religion. All over the world people practice Christianity, Buddhism, Muslim, catholic, and other types of ritual sacrifices.
The only reason why I disliked this movie because their was no narration or text throughout the movie. There was music. The music and sound effect flowed with the shots but it didn't help me understand what is going on. If there was a voice or text heard or see, the film might be less confusing.


Poor villagers



I got to admit that this movie inspired me. I am glad that I watched this film because the shots were so professional, and it makes me want to have really nice looking shots in my next film. I would have never thought to see a movie like this with each shot having a foreground, midground, and background. That inspired be so much. I saw so many beautiful shots of different places in the whole world, yes it makes me want to travel to those places.

The music was very unique because as seeing beautiful shots there was smooth calm music, but when I saw the scene where all the men wave their hands and dance and yell words out, the music was different. After that scene there was a transition of music to a sound effect of boom. And the boom was form a volcano that erupted.



baby chicks bing squished



In the beginning of the movie we see lots of poor people in rural areas. I think that this movie is trying to show how different cultures and social diversity affect poor people. Poor people are also living near dangerous places, for example, near volcanoes, and that affects their health and economic status.



humans being sqished



Overall this movie was interesting and I encourage everybody to watch it, because it MADE INTERSETING PARALLELS BETWEEN BABY CHICKS AND HUMANS. I thought that was we see baby chicks being squished and humans at a substation, people are jammed and squished as walking around. I think these parralles tell us that humans and animals are the same becausewe both live on the same planet and have many things in comen. I consider everyone who read this, go watch the film now!!