The central tension underpinning the question ‘can something be both political and poetic’ stems from the adherence to a conceptual binary which qualifies the political sphere as distinct from deontological forms of art. Stated another way, it presumes that to be political is to have a goal oriented or conventionally adherent formal structure.

However, Ron Fricke’s non-narrative documentary Samsara (2011, USA) contests the validity of this presumption through its interweaving of political ideas and experimental filmic aesthetics. Indeed, Fricke challenges, negates, or entirely subverts several formal principles popularised by documentary filmmakers; a breaching employed to emphasise specific political and philosophical standpoints.

For example, in lacking a linear narrative structure the film instead focuses its screen time on cataloguing environments, its various inhabitants, and other forms of sentient life, from the microbial to the human. Augmenting this, Fricke further negates any usage of expository, disembodied narration, talking heads, title cards, or explicit linguistic communication. In place of these conventional formal strategies, Fricke favours the ephemeral and the primal qualities of visual beauty and a complimentary non-diegetic musical soundtrack to orchestrate his politics.

However, it is important to pause here to recognise that Fricke’s film is not simply a truncated feed of unmitigated observations, but rather, through considered collation and juxtaposition, a visual essay intimately tethered to the Buddhist understanding of interconnectedness and suffering. Here, our experience of a cloud is not merely informative or narratively contributing, but rather more sensitive, more aesthetically visceral: the billowing form, projected across a screen, grand and overbearing in its towering stature. It’s a visual meditation on ephemerality, beauty, natural rhythms, and further yet, with its cessation and the birthing of the next visual vignette, the bones of an argument emerges.

It seems as if it is through this careful curation of images that Fricke’s meditation on the glory and gore of earth and its happenings is made more powerful. Emotionally, we are provoked, politically, we are challenged. With images of the natural landscape in all its spatial splendour contrasted with the claustrophobic mechanics of a densely populated metropolis, Fricke positions audiences into a mode of active viewing, inviting us to look more deeply into our emotional responses as the symptoms of a political view we might (and certainly Fricke) possibly hold.

The result is arguably as experientially poetic as it is explicitly political. While not overtly or worse yet, facetiously advertising for the morality of his political views, Fricke consciously presents his many images without the arrogance of assuming a cohesive context, story to tell, or facts to state. As such, though momentarily confounding in structure, Fricke’s formal experimentation acknowledges his audiences’ dignity, textually departing from the traditional linguistics of political ‘art’ to a heightened platform of artist expression which debates rather than dictates.