Post on 02-Jun-2018
8/10/2019 Sublimable Salgado: Wim Wenders' Pours Salt on Global Wounds
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Auguste Hill
Flash Doc Review
Sublimable Salgado:
Rubbing Salt into Global Wounds
Recently a most evocative & insightful film was shown at the AFI Film Festival in
Hollywood: Salt of the Earth, Wim Wenders' doc about photojournalist Sebastiao
Salgado. Photographing genocide & mass exodus around the planet for most of
his career Salgado eventually finds a bit of redemptive solace & hope inindigenous nature scapes as the narrative progresses.
As a result of the filmmakers (which include co-direction by Sebastiaos son
Juliano) well defined exploration of this existential shift in the photographers
creative identity I left the screening inspired to action.
In addition, Wenders' stylistic portrayal of the interplay with Salgados
professional photographic history combined with Wendersextensive experience
as a filmmaker provides a satisfying aesthetic inquiry. Manifesting as a palatable
synthesis of profoundly raw material, fodder for Wendersdeft talent in visual
dialects, Wenders facilitates for the viewer an opportunity for catharsis by
traveling a roughly hewn storyline while maintaining a prodigious appreciation
for the nature of hairpin turns in the human psyche. He also culls out an
awareness of Salgados ability to create beauty among deep veins of tragic
human horror while refining his eye for the strangely insistent beauty of evil and
calamity.
Also, Salt's very effectual cinematographer Hugo Barbier prompts a desire to
immerse onesoverly urbanized post-postmodern soul in the lush hills of
8/10/2019 Sublimable Salgado: Wim Wenders' Pours Salt on Global Wounds
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A. Hill 2
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Indonesia and the still raw and primitively fluent Amazon through his deft
handling of the lens.
Even more specific to the film's persuasive contrast to global violence and the
primal atrocities we are forcefully reminded via Salgado's images of the
sublimitive release of self inspired by the antidotal beatific elements of nature.
Fueling an impetus to become more involved in the plight of onesown lush
albeit camouflaged-by-cultural-progression natural terrain, Salt, enhances the
innate power of creative consciousness on a communal and individual level.
As we inhabit the 21stcentury there is an increasing need to learn how to
balance the deluge of violence provided in our daily media diets: beheadings,school shootings and viral war casualties, while maintaining a sense of
vulnerability to what persists in our humanness; Salt of the Earthfinds a space
between these concerns. The violence we perpetuate and the need to nourish
and protect the beauty we are fortunate enough to find remaining among us is a
very pertinent statement to be made today in film or any other medium. The
wholeness of the sensual world isnt something we laud as profitable in our lives
usually but Saltmakes the point that it certainly deserves our attention.
Bio of the Author
Auguste is a hybrid writer, experimental filmmaker and performance artist based
in Los Angeles, CA and Paris, France. Shes working on a novel about female
identity that should come out soon. Follow @AugusteHill