Review

The Salt of the Earth

Sebastiao Salgado’s Kalema camp, west of Tigray, Ethiopia, 1985 is one of the photographs featured in Wim Wenders’ documentary The Salt of the Earth.
Sebastiao Salgado’s Kalema camp, west of Tigray, Ethiopia, 1985 is one of the photographs featured in Wim Wenders’ documentary The Salt of the Earth.

In her 2003 book Regarding the Pain of Others, the late critic Susan Sontag rails against the way the world's most comfortable citizens consume violence as spectacle, enjoying the thrill of "proximity without risk" while insulated from any real repercussions.

"'To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism," she writes. "It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment ... It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people's pain... consumers of news, who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality."

The Salt of the Earth

86 Cast: Documentary, featuring Sebastiao Salgado

Directors: Wim Wenders, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado

Rating: PG-13

Running time: 110 minutes

Maybe it's good to keep those words in mind as we watch Wim Wenders' latest documentary profile of an artist and his methods, the Cannes-awarded and Oscar-nominated The Salt of the Earth, a meditation on the life and work of Brazilian photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado, told largely through the presentation of the artist's burnished black-and-white images of how the anonymous many are made to suffer for the benefit of the few. The photos are both beautiful and shattering.

"We are a ferocious animal," Salgaldo says. "We humans are terrible animals."

And so we are. Sontag considered Salgaldo's work in her book, and while acknowledging the photographer's noble intentions, worried about the inherent objectification of his subjects. To Sontag's mind, Salgado's reluctance to identify his subjects by name made him "complicit, if only inadvertently, in the cult of celebrity that has fueled an insatiable appetite for the opposite type of photograph: to grant only the famous their names demotes the rest to representative instances of their occupations, their ethnicities, their plights."

So, one way of looking at Salgado's photographs is that they are ultimately dehumanizing to people -- the "salt of the earth." Whatever Salgado's intentions, he's in the business of producing luxury items for rich people who want to advertise an elevated consciousness.

I'm not quite sure I agree with this evaluation of Salgado's work, but I wish Wenders (and his co-director, the photographer's son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado) had at least taken note of the perspective. Instead, we're given a coffee table book of a movie, an undeniably moving and beautiful film that feels a little less honest than it might have been. (It doesn't help that Wenders' narration sometimes runs to purple hagiography.)

That doesn't mean that Salgado comes across as anything less than honorable and decent -- in fact, he's revealed as a humble and committed man interested in illuminating the world's worst atrocities. After being exiled from his home country as a political radical in 1969, he studied economics and worked for the World Bank before giving up a potentially lucrative career to document the world's misery. His gifts were obvious from the start (though it would have been nice had the film delved deeper into his technique).

While Wenders may still be primarily known as the director of narrative films such as Wings of Desire (1987) and Paris, Texas (1984), The Salt of the Earth is the latest in a string of documentaries about artists and their work including Lightning Over Water (1980) and Tokyo-Ga (1984), which explored the careers of film directors Yasujiro Ozu and Nicholas Ray, respectively, the Cuban jazz film Buena Vista Social Club (1999) and Pina (2011) about choreographer Pina Bausch.

The Salt of the Earth is of a piece with this work, professionally realized and appreciative, a humanist gloss on a major talent. It's a good film, not a great one, that might have benefited from a little more distance from its admittedly charming subject.

MovieStyle on 05/15/2015

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