Samsara: The Wheel of Life and Death
1972 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Bill Davies
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, sensual
Without narration, the camera observes daily life in Pondicherry, a coastal city in southeastern India once held by France. Streets fill with passing activity as birth, work, and death unfold within a continuous flow of images.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Davies strips away the expected guru-wisdom narrative about India and just *looks*—which is bold enough, but the real subversion is how he makes you feel the weight of cycles without ever naming them, let the form do the philosophy.
A disciplined essay film that inherits the structural intelligence of Brakhage and the phenomenological rigor of '70s cinema verité, using Pondicherry's layered colonial and spiritual geography as both subject and formal constraint—the kind of work that earns its abstraction.
The decision to hold on faces and street rhythms without cutting away, letting duration become the argument itself, transforms what could've been travelogue into something that feels like *witnessed* time rather than curated spectacle.