“The Invisible Visible – the Subjects of Samsara“
Mandy Rose (UWE Bristol)
“An extraordinary multisensory journey through bodies, souls and space” (The Film Stage), “a strikingly original and profound artwork” (The Guardian), winner of the Encounters Award at the Berlin Film Festival; I noticed Lois Patiño’s Samsara because of the acclaim it was receiving for its attention to the sensory. As I have been thinking about the expanded sensorium of immersive media, I was curious about these sensory dimensions and their role in the work.
Patiño’s docufiction begins in Buddhist Laos and ends in Islamic Zanzibar. The first section takes place around a Buddhist temple and follows a young man, Amid, as he reads the Bardo Thödol – the Tibetan Book of the Dead – to an elderly woman, Mon, in the last days of her life. After Mon dies, the viewer is invited to accompany her on her journey through bardo – the state between death and rebirth – as she searches for a new embodied form, emerging as a kid goat born in coastal Zanzibar.
Patiño worked with two cinematographers with contrasting aesthetics. What the director describes as the “more masculine” first section is shot by Mauro Herce, in and around Luang Prabang Temple. Here, we observe the life of novice monks through long takes in which children and young men swathed in orange robes study, pray, eat, sleep. Slow cinema calls on us to attend to the rhythm and flow of temple routines. It also delivers an extraordinary visual feast: visiting the Kuang Si waterfall, the monks are framed in wide shot – tiny, robed figures with white water cascading over huge boulders behind them. The final “more feminine” section of the film explores life in the Islamic community on the coast of Zanzibar that Neema, the kid goat, is born into, becoming the companion of Juwairya, a girl in primary school. There, women farmers scratch out a living harvesting seaweed. Shot by Sarah Jessica Rinland, these images plunge the viewer into the locale – hands stroking the baby goat, digging sand with shells, seaweed shimmering in a rock pool – the “haptic visuality” of Rinland’s camerawork grounding the viewer in the physicality of a life where farming means sitting all day in the cold shallows.
Patiño describes his film as “half-documentary.” Only Mon is played by an actress, although most of the participants have roles in the narrative. Scripted scenes relating to death and the afterlife are intercut with observational sequences. Novice monks hang out their robes to dry, look at photos on their mobile phones, compare family backgrounds. In Zanzibar, Juwairya’s mother tells her about beliefs about the end of life, men haggle over fish in the market, Juwairiya’s grandmother shows her how to clean seaweed, a Maasai selling jewelry explains customs relating to the dead to children gathered round him on the beach.
Between the sections in Laos and Zanzibar is a sequence conjuring bardo. Fifteen minutes of abstraction – with the audience instructed to close their eyes and listen to a dense evolving soundscape, while the screen remains black, with blasts of bright color that register through the eyelids. Citing Derek Jarman, Stan Brakhage, and James Turrell as inspirations, Patiño says he had the idea for such a sequence in mind for years but was searching for a context that would allow for it in a narrative rather than experimental film.
Reviewers have praised the film’s visual richness and formal radicalism – “proof that cinema can still be something completely new in 2023”, “part film, part guided meditation…unlike anything else you will experience in the cinema.” What’s erased from these readings, it seems to me, is the Laotian and Zanzibarian subjects – who become a backdrop for Patiño’s formal experiment. Neither the lived experience we see on screen nor their role in making the film prompts comment. Yet the film depends on their performances and was shaped, “Patiño suggests”, by the cultural knowledge they shared with him during two months he spent in Laos, and then in Zanzibar.
Thinking about the participants of this hybrid work, I’m struck by the lack of transparency about the terms of their involvement (barring a few passing comments by Patiño in interviews) and their lack of voice in relation to the finished film. While there isn’t generally an expectation of such transparency, it seems like an anachronism that expectations about this haven’t shifted since Robert Flaherty directed Allakariallak to enact his vision of Inuit life in the original docufiction Nanook of the North (1922). As we explore what “decolonizing” documentary might look like, we need to address equity, ethics, duty of care, tease out what constitutes extractive practice – economically and culturally. To do so, we need to connect the dots between production and exhibition to be able to interrogate current practice. In that spirit, here are some questions for Patiño, and for us as curators, audiences, and teachers.
To Patiño: What were the terms of engagement with the participants of Samsara? How did you think of them – as participants, subjects, performers, co-creators? What did you tell people about the film when you first contacted them? Did you share the script with them? How did you recompense people for their cultural knowledge and for their time in performing in the film? How was the value of these types of participation estimated? Were the terms of engagement transparent to everyone involved? Were they the same for everyone involved? Looking back now, do you feel the arrangements were equitable?
For curators, teachers, scholars: What might it look like to seek transparency about the terms of the relationships that underlie documentary and docufiction works, especially in contexts marked by evident structural inequality between producers, subjects, and audiences? How might we engage with filmmakers, commissioners, festivals, and distributors to raise these questions? Might we champion particular frameworks such as the use and publication of Community Benefits Agreements? How might we seek to amplify the voices of participants, as well as reviewers and critics, with regional and cultural expertise within exhibition practices?
While Samsara achieves a remarkable sensory richness, the film’s very immersivity in the communities where it was filmed draws attention to what is not visible: the subjects’ relationship to the making of the film. There is nothing unusual in Samsara’s lack of transparency about the terms of that engagement. It’s typical that viewers enjoy cinematic affects while not being informed about the arrangements within production. However, as consumers increasingly concern themselves not just with the quality and price of goods but also with the working conditions and sustainability of manufacture, shouldn’t the same type of scrutiny be possible in cultural contexts? In short, what would ethical consumption look like in the context of documentary?
“It Will Be a Long Journey. Now, Close Your Eyes.”
Anup Grewal (University of Toronto)
I must admit that when I was presented with the opportunity to watch and reflect upon Galatian director Lois Patiño’s Samsara (2023), the title of which refers to the Buddhist cycle of life, death and rebirth, I was both intrigued and wary. I’d heard about the film’s much-hailed immersive experiment of traversing into the bardos – the transitional states between the moments of death and rebirth described in the Tibetan Buddhist text, Bardo Thödol – by having the audience close their eyes for almost 15 minutes as they are assaulted by flashes from the screen and a cacophony of sounds. I was intrigued by Patiño’s avant-garde film practice, grounded in a deep interest in composing documentary images to reveal multi-layered experiences of reality through different temporal and spatial perspectives, spiritual planes, and states of consciousness (memory, dreams, afterlives, encounters with different natural environments, animal life, texts, art, myths and legends). While in his previous films, Patiño used the digital camera to accumulate a mass of images to capture different perceptions of and perspectives on reality, Samsara’s imagery is more precisely composed through a more limited use of 16mm filmstock.
I was simultaneously wary about Patiño’s position as a Spanish director – whose gaze has largely been educated by traditions of European landscape painting, philosophy, psychology, film, and art theory – making a film about Tibetan and Laotian Buddhist and Islamic spiritual practices while moving between locales in Laos and Zanzibar. These are faiths and places that have a history of being gazed at, including within the visual and narrative apparatus of cinema, through a colonizing, voyeuristic ‘otherness’ that makes them exotic, romantic, and mystic. However, Patiño, in a refreshingly self-reflective understanding of his “position as a white European going to these places,” has himself remarked on this concern: “As a filmmaker I like to bring beauty to the image…. [B]ut the distance between making a postcard and creating an interesting image is very small.”
So, we might ask, what does Samsara’s avant-garde documentary representation of the Tibetan Bardo Thödol and the journey from death to rebirth connecting villages in northern Laos and coastal Zanzibar propose in terms of a non- or de-exoticizing cinematic language?
One key layer of the film’s visual and aural apparatus is its close attention to the contemporary particularities of the built and natural environments of places and to the ways of being, believing, and doing of the people inhabiting them. Even panoramic landscapes displace an omniscient perspective through lingering, contemplative, point-of-view shots with no sound.
A second layer of the film elaborates a multi-perspectival presentation of visible reality by evoking the experience of place, space, and time on different psychic or conscious planes. In one sequence of shots of a sleeping boy in a tent, a superimposed dream text of Buddhist mosaics and wall paintings glimpsed earlier scroll over the image. A postcard view of Buddhist art is disrupted through its appearance in the dreams of a child daily immersed in its iconography. This second layer also unsettles both the temporal and spatial geographies of experience and reality. A nap under a tree may have taken an hour or a week, while our 15 minutes of closing our eyes in the middle of the film may or may not have been the 49 days the Bardo Thödol states is the time between death and rebirth.
The film leads us into the into the alternate time-space of the bardos through the conversations between Amid, a youth from a village adjacent to the monastery, and Mon, an elderly woman close to death. Amid reads Mon the Bardo Thödol to guide her soul into death and rebirth. We first see Mon asleep, as Amid waits quietly for her to wake. When she does not, he dips his fingers into a glass of water and lets some gently drop on her hand until she starts to stir. “I was in the sea,” she says. “There I was, in a sea I had never seen before. I was a starfish, a red one. My child, I want to be reincarnated as an animal.”
Amid’s gesture and Mon’s dream connect places marked in this world by geographic, geopolitical, and cultural distance, but which perhaps reside closer in the realm of the inter-species transmigration of souls. When we are transported along with Mon’s soul to the small seaweed farming village along the coast of Zanzibar, our eyes open to a gestural repetition – of a mother gently dropping water onto the hand of her sleeping child. If the time-space of the bardos connects people, places, and species in ways not visible in this world, the film proposes that the similarity of gestures, forms of intimacy and emotion, or questions around the meaning of life and death across distant places may also connect them.
When Mon dies, Amid continues to read from the Bardo Thödol to guide her soul. A script appears on the screen, echoing the guiding voice of the book: “Mon’s spirit is going to travel through the bardo…. Thanks to the book, she will know how to guide herself. We will go along with her.” The script instructs us, “To make this trip, we must close our eyes. We will sense light through our eyelids but we will not open them. Only when the silence comes will we open them again.”
The screen turns black, and the script continues, “It will be a long journey; now close your eyes.”
Alternating black and colored screens flash and strobe across our closed eyes. We hear high-pitched tones, bronze drums and cymbals, flowing water, wind, thunder, rain, conversations in different languages, animal and other sounds. The cacophony ends with the sound of waves crashing, and we sense a place very different, if familiar through Mon’s dream, from the one we were in before. A long silence follows.
Our eyes adjust into the repeated gesture of water dropping on the hand of a sleeping child. The child is Juwairiya, and her mother wakes her with news: the birth of a baby goat. Mon’s soul has been reborn in Zanzibar as Neema the baby goat, beloved friend of Juwairiya.
In this coastal village in Zanzibar, Islam is the dominant faith, and women harvest seaweed for a global cosmetic industry. The film presents us with different beliefs and experiences of the cycle of life and death. Juwairiya’s grandmother explains how living seaweed changes shape to become an ingredient in soap and lotion. As the soul is reborn into different forms of life across distances, so too is seaweed reborn into products that traverse across connected geographies – though perhaps more uneven economic and political ones.
In the end, Samsara is an immersive sensory and imagistic exploration of the often-invisible realms of existence and connection between people, places, species, things, space, and time. While it is a bold experiment in representing these realms in a non-exoticizing cinematic language, one is still left wondering about the thin line between “the postcard and the interesting image” whose edge it traverses.
DOCALOGUE 