Seeing the world through the lens of Sebastiao Salgado
The Salt of the Earth
Rating: ★★★★½
Directed by: Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado
Running time: 110 minutes
We haven’t wandered with Wim Wenders in a while. The German director’s last feature was the 2011 Oscar-nominated documentary Pina, an eye-popping exploration of dance — in 3D no less. Since then he’s contributed segments to a couple of anthology films, but nothing full-length.
Still, he’s clearly been busy. The Salt of the Earth follows acclaimed photographer Sebastiao Salgado across time and space, documenting more than four decades of the man’s globetrotting work and finding more than a little philosophy between the frames. It’s a wondrous, humanistic portrait.
Wenders inserts himself most forcefully into the film in the opening as he provides background on his subject, who was born in Brazil in 1944 but moved to France in 1969. The filmmaker has documented artists before, most often musicians and most famously in 1999’s Buena Vista Social Club.
Salgado was on track to become an economist when his wife purchased a camera, and he found himself drawn to it. He subsequently worked on long-term projects that took him away from her and their two children for months at a time. If there is a gap in this Oscar-nominated documentary, it is the way it begs the question of how this affected his young family. But Salgado’s eldest son, Juliano, co-directs, so we know the time apart hasn’t left them completely estranged.
A mostly chronological timeline allows Salgado, now a bald and distinguished-looking 71, to reminisce as we examine his photographs. In the 1970s he returned to South America, finding societies that excelled at drinking, running and music. In Brazil he shot pictures of the Serra Pelada gold mine.
Later assignments took him to famine-ravaged Ethiopia in the mid-1980s; the burning oilfields of Kuwait after the first Gulf War; and the Rwandan genocide of 1994. In Ethiopia he saw Coptic Christians washing bodies of the dead during a drought. In Kuwait he came upon a walled garden full of oil-covered birds. The Rwandan photos include one showing the aftermath of an attack on a school, the day’s lesson visible on the chalkboard.
There is a kind of raw beauty in many of these images, even the ones that portray human suffering and death. Salgado never shrank from his subjects; you could lose yourself in the images he captured. Wenders says he first became interested in this adventurer/photographer more than 20 years ago, when he happened on some of the gold mine pictures.
By the end of his time in Rwanda, Salgado says, he became stricken by a kind of soul-wasting disease. He found solace in returning to his parents’ Brazilian farmland,
He also turned away from social documentary work and toward indigenous people and natural subjects. Wenders accompanies him on a trip to the Arctic to photograph walruses, a task made more difficult by the presence of a hungry polar bear. But of course the photographer has faced down much more potent dangers.
The most dangerous game to shoot is man.