‘Salt of the Earth’ riveting
Wim Wenders faced a certain occupational hazard in shooting a documentary about a fellow cameraman: “The man shoots back.”
He was speaking — and we will be learning — about Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, whose ceaseless travels to all corners of the globe have borne witness to many of the past half-century’s most calamitous events. His pictures reveal the brutalities of war, famine and poverty. But those disasters aren’t his “subjects.”
Mr. Salgado’s subject is people. That’s what “Salt of the Earth,” the title, refers to, derived from Christ’s words to the folks on the Mount, in Matthew 5:13: “You are the salt of the earth.” But if the salt loses its flavor, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.
People getting trampled would become Mr. Salgado’s obsession. Educated as an economist, he and his wife-muse Lelia were ’60s radicals who fled militarist Brazil for Paris, where he gave up a lucrative business career for an adventurer’s life in photography.
A photographer (etymologically) is someone who draws with light, and “Salt of the Earth” is full of such stunning drawings — images of split-second, black-and-white revelation — accompanied by Mr. Salgado’s accounts of taking them: slave workers in Brazilian gold mines; Kuwaiti oil wells aflame in the wake of Saddam’s retreat; gentle Coptic Christians quietly starving in Ethiopia; 250,000 driven from their villages to die in the Congo; epidemic cholera in the refugee camps; human skeletons, whose “governments” deliberately withhold relief food; unspeakable genocide in Rwanda.
Violence and brutality are no monopoly of the so-called Third World. Mr. Salgado chronicles its manifestation in mainland Europe — Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia — “to see how contagious hate is.”
Overnight, your next-door neighbors are shooting at you, says the deeply insightful artist, driven by empathy for the human condition. “We humans are ferocious animals.”
His work helped bring worldwide attention — and tragically belated relief — to the victims. But also despair to himself. What was left to do in the wake of Rwanda? After looking into the heart of that darkness, “I no longer believed in anything.”
But he found a measure of redemption back home in the 600hectare wasteland of his oncerich family farmstead. Drought and erosion had devastated it. He and Lelia would replant and somehow rebuild its deforested ecosystem.
Healing the land would heal the despair.
And they would embark on another project of discovery — celebrating the flora and fauna of pristine new territories — in a huge new photographic tribute to the planet’s beauty and mystery.
Did you ever compare an iguana’s paws in the Galapagos to a knight’s armored hand in the 16th century? Mr. Salgado does. Brilliantly.
“We’re cousins,” he says simply.
Did you ever think the destruction of nature can be reversed? Mr. Salgado does. With proof of it.
“Salt of the Earth’s” fabulous locations include Wrangel Island in the Russian Arctic (rolling around with walruses and polar bears), Papua New Guinea (with the Yali tribe), and Brazil’s spectacular rain forests. Mr. Salgado’s journeys are of two types: the outward geographical one and the parallel inner one — both equally transfixing.
This is a fine addition to director Wenders’ fascinating body of work. He lets the world — or certain powerful artists inhabiting it — take him wherever they may, in gorgeous art pix like “Paris, Texas” (1984) and such masterful documentaries as “Buena Vista Social Club” (1999) and “Pina” (2011) — both Oscar-nominated, as was “Salt of the Earth” this year.
Mr. Wenders’ co-writer-director on the project was Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, the photographer’s son. Together they combine the former’s proven interviewer/storyteller skills with the latter’s ability to elicit insights from his dad.
Bottom line: The amazing Salgado images that revolutionized social-doc photography are even more powerful and lustrous when seen on a big screen.
I’m still stunned — not horrified but haunted — by his series of baby funeral photos among the landless workers of northeast Brazil, where infant mortality is so high (over 50 percent) that baby coffins are just rented, not purchased, before burial. If the babes were baptized, their eyes are closed. If unbaptized, the eyes are left open — to help them find their own way through limbo to eternity.
In French, Portuguese and English, with subtitles. Opens today at Regent Square Theater.