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Still from Samsara. Photo: Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories

A planet-sized coffee-table book of a film, the 99-minute Samsara by Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson routes unnarrated, untitled footage from 25 countries through a lens drawn to repetition, patterns and epic scale. Many of its 70-millimeter frames could pass for photographs by Andreas Gursky or Edward Burtynsky. One scene looks like it was shot in the same chicken-processing factory in China that Burtynsky documented in 2005.

Collated with these postcards for overpopulation and consumerism are portraits of men, women and children with penetrating stares. By the time Samsara ends, we’ve met dozens of today’s Sharbat Gulas: a maimed veteran whose entire head looks rebuilt through plastic surgery; a Himba woman from Namibia; a dancer at the front of a line performing the Guanyin dance of a thousand arms; a white man and two teenagers, presumably American, posed proudly with their rifles in a garage.

Samsara vacillates between an indictment of what we’ve done to the world — and to ourselves in the process — and wide-eyed wonder at the glorious mess of it all. Grand civic, religious and royal architectures receive similar treatment to natural wonders like glaciers and Arches National Park. (Shots of cliff dwellings at Betatakin, in Arizona, and carved-from-rock facades at Petra, in Jordan, bridge the gap, as we see in details how these miracles of the built environment are being reclaimed by time. A brief glimpse of Mali stings, as holy sites there were damaged this summer by Islamist Ansar Dine militants.)

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