Baraka (1992)

Baraka arrives from 1992, a year when a documentary could still be trusted to say nothing at all. Ron Fricke's camera travels through twenty-four countries, sixty-five millimeters of film, and fourteen months of patience, and it never once offers a thesis statement. We get Maasai celebrations, the Ryoan temple, burning oil fields in Kuwait, a Tokyo subway at rush hour, and chanting monks, assembled without narration, interviews, or a soothing voice explaining what any of it means. The film takes its name from an Islamic concept of blessing. That is the extent of its editorializing.

Certain images would tempt a lesser production into sermonizing: the tracking shots through Auschwitz and Tuol Sleng, the skulls stacked in a room, the aircraft boneyard at Davis-Monthan, the coal mine at Black Mesa. Baraka shows them and moves on. There is no narrator to supply the moral, no text card to assign blame, no closing montage instructing us how to feel about capital, empire, or the planet's temperature. A yakuza's tattoo is cut against tribal body paint, gesturing at human commonality without filing a report on it. Diversity here is the simple census of the planet, presented without commentary, which is to say without an argument to make.

The result has aged into something rare: a global survey with no agenda to sell. It observes, it lingers, it departs. Ebert proposed it as the single film to send to the stars, a reasonable choice precisely because it never tells the recipient what to think. For those of us who spend our days cataloguing the ideological freight of the moving image, this is a dry vintage. Smooth, elegant, and containing almost nothing to classify.