The Salt of the Earth (2014)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Salt of the Earth (2014) – W. Wenders & J. R. Salgado

The still photographs by Sebastiao Salgado at the heart of this documentary are worth the price of admission alone.  As Wenders intones at the start of the film, they are paintings made of light.  But these photos are also so rich in their complexity (or alternately their simplicity), that they are almost psychedelic in the way they heighten your experience, your understanding of the photographer’s experience of the subject…and something of the subject’s experience as well.  Around these images, other stories are told, mostly about Salgado and his life: he escaped from dictatorial Brazil to Paris and then ventured all around the world, witnessing great suffering in Africa in particular, and then later the serenity of nature.  Although Wenders is but a partner in this enterprise (with Salgado’s son), it is hard not to think about his career and its latest resurgence in documentary films – his vision and worldview are still as rewarding as they once were.  Yet, one can’t help also to think about his contemporary Werner Herzog and what wonders he might have extracted from these images and the complicated ethics of the observer cum participant.  Of course, then the film would have been about Herzog above all else; Wenders wisely stays mostly in the margins, allowing Salgado and his poetic and heartbreaking images to stay in focus.