I watched this movie in my Honors class today- "Bakara". It's a nonverbal film about all the things that happen in the world, in one day. I didn't realize that at first, because I never got the email until 5 minutes before it stated then didn't have a chance to read it, so I think the effect was a bit lessened. That is, until I read the letter after and thought back on all I'd seen.

Scenes of awesome beauty and power- rainforest, mountains, volcanoes with ash spewing and covering the sky, oceans, a sunset- as well as those worse than any horror writer could ever imagine. Seemingly endless columns of shacks on topof each other in piles that seem barely able to withstand their own weight. People living in one room hovels seventy feet above the ground! Scenes of people carrying their dead in gorgeous colored fabric and beading down to the river, laying them there for blessing? ritual purfication? before carrying them to special sites for burning. Funeral pyres on the sides of the street, the ash and soot of burnt bodies rising above crowds of poverty-stricken to settle in their hair and lay on their skin!


The curious sensation of outrage as I watched baby chicks get carelessly thrown and tumbled, while scenes of human misery roll by without complaint, amazed me. Are we so used to seeing humans hurt that we care less for them than chickens? Do we regard animals as superior to ourselves? Or do we distance ourselves from the suffering because we feel that they should help themselves while animals are helpless? I wondered these things as the scenes rolled on.

Watching as tribal and religious leaders brought their people howling to their feet or masses precisely synchronized in chant, was incredible! It made me want to go to these places and take part, or figure out what made them so happy about doing it! The stomping and jumping of a central figure in a ring- what was it for? Why?

I loved when they seemed to compare humans to insects, marching along in columns, back and forth to where they need to go. It's true, so why do we feel superior to them?

The theme of facades and reality intrigued me. Poverty-stricken youth skipping through the streets singing along with their friends and relatives, while elegantly-dressed business men glare imperiously, even angrily!, at the camera while waiting for the subway. How does this work? From all that I saw, those who had nothing were happy whereas those who had plenty, loved nothing! Maybe you have to enjoy the essentials before you can enjoy the extras. Maybe if you don't know anything better, you're happy with what you have- the grass can't be greener if you can't see over the fence?

The man who appeared so disturbed after scenes of destruction and needless violence, screaming with his hands up around his face, affected me deeply. You could feel how disturbed he was, screaming and hiding from a world gone mad. The scene in which a whole village was deserted and fields left to rot, gave me the chills- what happened to those people?

I think the producers were trying to help us, the viewers, gain some perspective. The movie shows fear and insanity caused by a war or disease, while just around the corner (you know, 12000 miles away), the sun is rising over snow-capped mountains and each is wreathed in a breath of cloud. It speaks of facades and the differing realities beneath. It shows that so much happens in the world in a single day, that one person, though jsut as in the religious or ritualistic chanting, was important, they were only part of a much larger whole. The imagery was powerful, the contrasting scenes of beauty and death gradually changing into scenes with deeper meaning- how we can treat our own species with such disregard, how we use the world around us for any purpose we see fit, and how many of us have forgotten the small things- is it really that important to be powerful? Would you rather be happy and hungry or rich and uncaring? I guess that brings up the question of if you've never had it, how do you want it?

So how do I work this into an essay? God, I wish I knew. Raw emotion went along with this film- how to refine it and process it into sentences and paragraph formation that will get an A? What's the point? Where's my perspective now?