Man, Baraka was my favourite movie when I was younger, I must have watched it dozens of times.
I will always love the film for its ingenuity and beautiful cinematography and music, but now I can't help but think that the movie is really fundamentally anti-modernity, and in a subtle way kind of misanthropic. It kind of suggests that human civilisation can bring only chaos and death, and almost in an anarcho-primitivist sort of way seems to suggest a return to pre-modern civilisation as preferable.
I like the way it frames that juxtaposition between modernity and premodern/natural systems. Both are coexisting at the same time, both are represented, and without any kind of narration we're left to gravitate toward whatever feels more right. While it favours those other systems, so does Marxism ultimately. Those indigenous cultures are an anticolonial argument, those premodern cultures are a re-establishment of the commons, those monkeys in the hot spring are a case for animal liberation.
Man, Baraka was my favourite movie when I was younger, I must have watched it dozens of times.
I will always love the film for its ingenuity and beautiful cinematography and music, but now I can't help but think that the movie is really fundamentally anti-modernity, and in a subtle way kind of misanthropic. It kind of suggests that human civilisation can bring only chaos and death, and almost in an anarcho-primitivist sort of way seems to suggest a return to pre-modern civilisation as preferable.
I like the way it frames that juxtaposition between modernity and premodern/natural systems. Both are coexisting at the same time, both are represented, and without any kind of narration we're left to gravitate toward whatever feels more right. While it favours those other systems, so does Marxism ultimately. Those indigenous cultures are an anticolonial argument, those premodern cultures are a re-establishment of the commons, those monkeys in the hot spring are a case for animal liberation.