Vulture Magazine The Michaelmas Issue 2013 | Page 25

four to five people in the crew. This reduction in expenses enabled the team to stay
on location for a longer duration and visit an increased number of incredible sites.
Despite greater accessibility and exposure
to exotic locations through the internet, the
highly visual beauty captured in both Baraka and Samsara still retain the capacity to
stun the viewer. Magidson says that the aim
was purely to make “little blocks of content and let the images guide everything.”
For the Baraka Blu-ray, Magidson pioneered a revolutionary film-to-digital
scanning process. The resulting Blu-ray
was described by critic Roger Ebert as
“the finest video-disc I have ever viewed
or ever imagined” and “by itself sufficient reason to acquire a Blu-ray player.”
The films take an interesting approach to
portraits: Magidson argues that through
the portrait scenes, he and Fricke were
not attempting to “present a strong point
of view”, but rather give minimal direction, telling the subjects to just “look at
the camera and don't blink” because this
allows the cinematographer to “capture
the essence, just like stills photography.”
In structuring both films, Magidson further
expresses his inventive capabilities. The

documentaries are made up of three to five
minute sequences, each given to the composers in separate pieces. Each edited sequence then has an arc, a “little parable or
story that's being told in the edit and the
music that leaves the viewers more space to
feel what they bring to the experience, as
you're not micro managing the emotions as
you do in a conventional film with dialogue.”
Through his documentaries, Samsara in
particular, Magidson provides the viewer
with a meditative sequencing of life. Despite the continued representation of archetypal concepts of culture, both documentaries also go some way in revitalising
these tropes (as with the pyramid scenes)
and reincorporating them into the modern world. As film without narrative or
language, they have a powerfully universal
quality, exploring how beauty can be experienced everywhere from the walls surrounding religions in Israel to the inexorable cycles of creation and destruction in Tibet.
If the purpose of documentary is to entertain, Magidson achieves this unequivocally, presenting the audience with
an inventive picture of the overwhelmingly beautiful dynamics of human life.
Beth Timmins