The Salt of the Earth

Directors: Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado/With: Sebastiao Salgado

Sebastiao Salgado; a photographer of international renown, is the subject of Wim Wenders/Juliano Ribeiro Salgado's documentary The Salt of the Earth. The film is not only a biopic but a celebration of Salgado's extraordinary work, which at times is poetic and political but also otherworldly and searing. His photography documents humanity's suffering, savagery and brutality but he also captures nature's inherent beauty and humanity in its seemingly endless diversity. In chronicling Salgado's career, Wenders and Salgado's son Juliano tell a story of an artist with decidedly humanistic concerns.

Conversations with Salgado, personal recollections and images of his work mingle to form the film's principle content though Wenders and Juliano document beauty of their own as they follow the photographer to remote locations, often filming Salgado against a breathtaking expanse.

The film opens with Salgado's familiar pictorial of Brazilian gold miners swarming in a vast pit, where arms coated with dirt dig and bare backs haul sacks of earth. We hear Salgado provide narration as he explains how the work was often treacherous; miners hoisting sacks of dirt up ladders where one slip might have not only injured the fallen but also those beneath. Salgado's pictures show the inhumanity and the madness in man's unquenchable thirst for gold. We also see a surrealistically sinister, Bosch-like hell.

The film segues into Salgado's early life in a small Brazilian village. The dictatorship that came to power in 1960s' Brazil formed the political climate from which Salgado escaped when he left his village for Paris to study economics. There he meets his future wife Lelia and it is there that his passion for photography emerges serendipitously. Determined to pursue some kind of vocation behind the camera, he invests in the necessary equipment before taking on mercenary work as a wedding photographer. It isn't long before his artistic ambitions outgrow his modest wage-earning.

Salgado's first project takes him back to South America for a photographic essay on laborers and the economically marginalized. The results are startling. Not only do we see the faces of those eking out a hardscrabble life but the stark environments they inhabit.

Ethnographic observation becomes a characteristic of his work as Salgado is welcomed into a Mexican village where music plays a significant role in the community. Interactive contact becomes part of his photographic wanderings.

We get a sense of Lelia's unwavering devotion and support, as Sebastiao's frequent absences become a minor problem for his family. Lelia and their infant son manage without him.

Wenders and Juliano's film vacillates between his photographic past and the present, as they follow Sebastiao to places far and remote, such as a deserted island near the Arctic circle. Hoping to photograph the island walruses, we see Sebastiao, Wenders and Juliano negotiate the cold, desolate landscape, only to be frustrated by a polar bear has frightened his subjects away.

We also see Salgado's work from his foray into Ethiopia in the 1980s' where he encountered the very grim famine that claimed many lives and ravaged the population. Among his unflinching representations are bodies emaciated by hunger and the corpses of those who lost the struggle. They are powerful images; ones that may cause one to turn one's head or shrink from their brutal truth. Salgado ventures into Mali, where he finds more of the same suffering; famine from severe drought.

Wenders and Juliano's cameras are often turned on framed photographs as Salgado discusses his work. As we gaze upon framed photos, Salgado's reflection sometimes appears in the glass; a fascinating visual whereby the artist's face is superimposed on his work.

The film continues with Salgado's photo essay of the Kuwait oil fields following the Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s'. The burning oil wells left behind by Saddam Hussein's army created a hellish landscape where black clouds billowing angrily from derricks created a near-endless night. The oleaginous muck drenching the oil workers who feverishly battled the blazes becomes another powerful image in Salgado's lens as are the eery, frightening shots of the oil-drenched landscape.

Yet another photographic endeavor is his essay on those displaced by wars in Bosnia and Rwanda, which are no less powerful. It is sobering to hear Salgado speak pessimistically of humanity after completing his project. We can sympathize; we are able to see some of what caught his eye and it isn't pretty. As a viewer, one can appreciate his courage and willingness to document subject matter the world would rather turn away from.

The film concludes with Salgado's environmental work; behind the camera and beyond it. We see some images from nature that are quite lovely, as is his study of an Amazonian tribe. In a film bursting with memorable images, one of the most is of Salgado's home village. When he returns to find the once verdant hills barren and smothered in desert, he becomes determined to re-forest the landscape. To see dense forest replace dust and sand imparts a sense of hope to the audience, who might be nearly overcome with pessimism after seeing so much imagery steeped in war, death and starvation. His quest for reclamation becomes a cogent statement about proactivity but it also serves as an affective coda to an amazing film.

Though Juliano shares directorial credit, The Salt of the Earth could have only been made by a director with Wenders' visual sense. Wenders' Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire are themselves rich in arresting, otherworldly images, which makes him an obvious choice to co-direct a documentary on an exceptional photographer.

Wenders and Juliano let Sebastiao speak for his work, a sound and preferable alternative to talking head testimonials that might clutter a lesser filmmaker's work.

Wenders/Juliano leave us with something memorable; a film that tests our capacity to look upon the world's less-appealing truths and reflect on its heartbreaking beauty. We find in Sebastiao Salgado an artist and a humanitarian. He shows us human-conceived horrors without stifling his message with a scold's finger-wagging. He simply asks us to look and consider how our species permits more suffering and carnage than we care to acknowledge. The Salt of the Earth is a terrific film about an everyman with an extraordinary, compassionate eye.