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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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