Phosphenes, those little dots of light or colour you sometimes see when your eyes are closed, and other “entoptic effects” are phenomena that it’s good to keep in mind while watching Samsara.
“The idea of the film started with dealing with the invisible,” says Lois Patiño, its director. “How can cinema reflect the invisible, the phantasmagoric, limbo? Limbo is a place that exists between reality and what lies beyond reality. It’s its own reality. I’m also very interested in how different cultures reflect on death and the afterlife. I had this radical idea of watching a film with your eyes closed. Some years after I had that thought, I read the Bardo Thödol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. That mapped the afterlife from a Buddhist perspective. How they imagined the afterlife could be something unique as a cinematography experience.”
Samsara, a triptych that the experimental Spaniard has fashioned around Buddhist concepts, opens in Laos, where a boy diligently reads extracts from the Tibetan Book of the Dead to an elderly woman on her deathbed. Between readings the boy befriends a group of novice monks as they journey to a waterfall. All of them ponder reincarnation, including the dying woman, who insists that being reborn as an animal should not be interpreted as punishment.
I wanted the film to be set in Laos instead of other Buddhist countries because I felt that Tibet and other countries are more represented in cinema
During the final reading the boy watches over the woman’s body as her soul departs. Patiño dramatises this phantasmagoric state of the bardo in a daring sequence that asks the audience to close their eyes and succumb to darkness. The ensuing soundscape is accompanied by flecks of colour that, on a cinema screen, are visible even through closed eyes.
Afterwards, the woman from the introductory sequence reincarnates as a goat named Neema in Zanzibar, where she lives among a community of seaweed farmers. Earlier actions are mirrored: just as the boy sprinkled water on the old woman’s hand in the hope of awakening her, a mother in Zanzibar does the same for her young daughter as she tells her that a kid has been born. Neema’s daily life allows a privileged glimpse into the lives of the seaside community around her.
“When I decided to mix the trip with the Bardo Thödol, the structure of the film appeared,” says the film-maker. “I wanted to follow the soul to different places. The first one had to be a Buddhist place, to introduce the book. And then I wanted a big contrast on all possible levels: religion, landscape, culture. And, also, women are not allowed to enter the Buddhist temple. So I wanted to focus on female community cultures that we are not so used to seeing on our screens. After my first research trip to Laos, I was invited to Zanzibar to give a video workshop. And I realised it had everything that I was looking for. It was perfect.”
Half a century ago the film-maker and provocateur Paul Schrader argued, in his book Transcendental Style in Film, that the formal achievements of the directors Carl Dreyer, Yasujiro Ozu and Robert Bresson were inspired by the transcendent. The attributes that Schrader identified – unobtrusive editing, naturalistic acting and austere framing and camerawork – are equally evident in the small but impactful subgenre of Buddhist-themed films.
There are exceptions (such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cannes winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Bae Yong-kyun’s Why Has Bodhi Dharma Left for the East? and Kim Ki-duk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring), but most such films focus on Tibetan Buddhism: in 1974, Lilliana Cavani’s Milarepa recounted the story of the 11th-century Tibetan spiritual leader of the title; in 1997, Martin Scorsese’s Kundun chronicled the life of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th dalai lama; Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha, from 1993, cast Keanu Reeves as Prince Siddhartha, the Buddha before his enlightenment.
“I wanted the film to be set in Laos instead of other Buddhist countries because I felt that Tibet and other countries are more represented in cinema,” says Patiño. “That was one of the plans of the film – to be half-documentary; to open up places we have never been.”
Two cinematographers, Mauro Herce and Jessica Sarah Rinland, filmed in Laos and Zanzibar, respectively. Xabier Erkizia’s sound design carefully follows the trajectory described in the Bardo Thödol. In common with the film-maker’s eerie Red Moon Tide, in which a tiny detail turns out to be a dam, scale is playfully employed: a monk dozes off only to find that his sleep has lasted for longer than he anticipated. It’s as close as anyone can get to a movie adaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
“For the first part of the film we follow the book and repeat sentences from the book that reflect my ideas about spirituality – this idea of being part of the same wholeness and to recognise that everyone has their own light and to recognise every sound as your own sound,” says Patiño. “In Red Moon Tide I showed people paralysed by their experience of time. With Samsara the monk falls asleep to the sound of the waterfall, and when he wakes up his friend says, ‘You’ve been asleep for a week.’ There are a lot of Catholic saints that have something similar happen to them. They fall asleep for years or centuries.”
One obvious reference point for Patiño while fashioning Samsara was Derek Jarman’s final feature film, Blue, from 1993, which relates the late director’s experiences as a gay man and an Aids patient, makes associations with the titular colour, and features meditations on mortality spoken against an unchanging hue. Another is the rich visual poetry of the Portuguese master Pedro Costa.
“Absolutely – Blue was a reference,” says Patiño. “That film is something amazing. I saw it maybe 15 or 20 years ago. For some films it is not so important to be perfect or even good. It’s more important to innovate and bring something that no one has seen before. I like so much the idea of having a bath of light. Watching it is like water flowing into you. Pedro Costa is also a great innovator. I’m an admirer of his world, the way he deals with slowness and quietness, and the deliberate movement of the actors. I wanted to create that kind of collective meditative experience,”
Samsara is Patiño’s third feature. Much of his previous work, including Red Moon Tide and Coast of Death, explores his native Galicia. Shorter, experimental projects take place in Tokyo and Morocco.
“All of my work is about the relationship between the human and landscape, trying to understand the nature of the sublime, and how, when you look at the landscape, it can look back at you,” he says. “A landscape has a cultural identity, history, legends and memory. The strata of time, of civilisation, is condensed in every landscape. Landscape is like my laboratory.”
Samsara opens in cinemas on Friday, January 26th
