|
There
are IMAX movies or educational documentaries like the
National Geographic ones, catching the audiences' attention
by amazing and never-before-seen images. Visual Art
movies however - and Baraka might be considered the
state-of-the-Visual-Art movie - are something distinctively
different, omitting dialogue and narration and relying
instead on a combination of imagery and music to provoke
feelings and awareness among the spectators. The rule
"A picture says more than a thousand words"
applies equally to art paintings and Visual Art movies.
Godfrey
Reggio's KOYANNISQATSI, featuring the avant garde music
of Philip Glass, gained international fame in 1983 and
has since then been considered as the most popular movie
representing this particular genre. KOYANNISQATSI's
cinematographer, Ron Fricke, debuted in 1985 with CHRONOS
as his first movie. Rather than overusing time lapse
photography as in KOYANNISQATSI (which tended to be
exhausting at times), Fricke kept it to a minimum and
relied on the visual impact the most impressive monuments
nature and mankind ever created instead. Michael Stearns
contributed a new age score with a rather sacral overtone
but better suited to make larger audiences more comfortable.
Out
of the collaboration of Ron Fricke and Michael Stearns
emerged BARAKA in 1992, an ambitioned Visual Art film
project whose shape took final form in an international,
theatrical release. One of the literally very last movies
shot in the expensive TODD-AO 70mm format, BARAKA takes
its viewers to 24 countries of our world, highlighting
more the aspects of mankind and its many religious beliefs,
tribal customs and needs than only the monuments as
in CHRONOS. It is worth to note that this is the first
time ever, a filmmaker was allowed to film the sacred
pilgrim heart of the Islam world, Mekka (puritan Americans
be warned: the picture contains tribal nudity).
If
there was ever a movie of the "Millennium" and
one everybody on this planet should see, it surely is
BARAKA. The movie is everything but trivial, it truly
captures the attention of the audience and comes close
to a spiritual experience, for lack of better word similar
to the star voyage of 2001. Once seen, one will never
feel the same about mankind. When I had the privilege
of watching BARAKA in a THX movie theatre, I felt the
experience to be truly narcotizing and could hardly
handle the overload of imagery and emotions.
Video: How Does The Disc Look?
The
previous said, it is pretty obvious that the DVD should
have been at least a new transfer with anamorphic 16X9
enhancement. Unfortunately, neither is the case. It
is simply a rehash of the previous LaserDisc letterbox
release and seems to be only 480i. Therefore even a
progressive out DVD player will not be able to improve
picture resolution. Color saturation and fidelity as
well as contrast are good, the pictures tend to have
truly filmlike quality but this is mostly owned to a
minimum of sharpness. There is a little but noticeable
jittering in the picture (poor transfer from film to
tape) but most annoying are the motion artifacts during
vertical and horizontal panning, best noticeable in
the beginning of the movie showing Himalayan mountains.
Naturally, the temptation is great to flip the DVD over
and watch the Pan & Scan full screen version instead
to catch at least part of the tiny details. However,
this is light-years away from Ron Fricke's original
intentions.
Audio: How Does the Disc Sound?
This
is the good news. Michael Stearns' musical score gains
in spaciousness, sound effects are very directional
(in one particular time-lapse shot, 3 thunderstorms
light from the right front speaker to the left one).
Given the poor picture quality and the absence of dialogue
and narration, one is actually tempted to regard and
use this DVD rather as a 5.1 DVD Audio than a DVD Video.
Supplements: What Goodies Are There? The
DVD features an 8-minute featurette that comes from
a composite source and shows scenes from the movie in
an awful picture quality that equals lowest-quality
VideoCDs. The featurette seems hastily assembled and
is by all means superficial considering the movie's
intentions and ambitions. It is a bizarre contrast to
the 20 minute long featurettes that sometimes accompany
the much shorter IMAX movies. The lack of care by MPI
Video for their "crown jewel" (which this
movie is compared to the other MPI DVD titles) is further
enhanced by missing subtitles informing the viewer what
he is watching during a particular moment.
Given
the fact that the viewer - depending on his educational
level - does not learn anything about the various locations
until the credits at the end and given the fact that
this DVD is a rather late release, a short glimpse at
the DVD EARTHLIGHT would have been useful and could
have helped to exploit this DVD's potential to the fullest.
EARTHLIGHT (like SPIRITUAL EARTH) exploits the current
DVD situation by the fact, that the IMAX movie BLUE
PLANET has not yet been released on DVD by this time.
Featuring shots of our planet from Earth orbit, this
DVD makes clever use of the subtitle availability, informing
the viewer which particular section of our planet he
is seeing at a certain time.
Parting Thoughts
Another
great movie and a great opportunity (missing subtitles)
has been messed up by a studio. The same applies for
MPI as it does for Slingshot for their poor IMAX DVDs.
It is about time these studios learn the lesson that
great multi-channel surround sound is the beginning
of a good home environment reproduction of these movies,
not the end. Given the fact, that BARAKA or IMAX movies
should be first experienced in the theater, some of
us will not have that privilege, thus they should have
reference picture quality when finally coming to DVD.
And even then, the home environment reproduction will
always be only a shadow of the theatrical reproduction.
DVD
buyers be advised that there exists a slightly different
Canadian DVD version from Motion / Columbia TriStar.
This DVD contains the identical letterbox transfer,
but lacks 5.1 Surround Sound and the 8 minute featurette.
However, it contains a teaser trailer, mislabeled as
"photos" in the DVD menu.
I highly
recommend this DVD because of its content and importance,
but do so with mixed feelings regarding the poor picture
quality.
|
