Review The Salt of the Earth
Author: Ken Homer Issue: 2023-10-04
Review: The Salt of the Earth
by Ken Homer
Review: The Salt of the Earth, a film by Wim Wenders
This movie left my wife and I in a state of awe. That said, it is a difficult movie to watch as it contains graphic images of famine and genocide. In The Salt of the Earth, director Wim Wenders explores the life and work of Sebastião Salgado, one of the world’s great photographers. Originally from Brazil, Salgado obtained a BA and a master’s degree in economics at the University of Sao Paulo before obtaining his Ph.D. from the University of Paris. That education gave him a deep understanding of how certain things work in the world. While studying in Paris, he discovered a love of photography that took him to over 120 countries in his career.
The film opens with a series of incredible black and white photographs of Brazil’s open pit gold mine in Serra Pelada, with thousands of men climbing up and down handmade wooden ladders. Salgado comments that it looks as if the whole population of miners were slaves but, as he explains they are all volunteers, and are slaves only in the sense of men who get exposed to gold cannot leave it and so become slaves to the precious metal itself. Check this link for some of the images he shot while there.
As the film unfolds you learn just what an astonishing human being Salgado is. Wenders comments on a particularly striking photograph of a blind woman, saying that it brings tears to his eyes whenever he sees it and that it reveals a man who has something bordering on reverence for his subjects. Salgado’s face is often on screen shot against a black background. At 79 his visage belies a world weariness while disclosing a spirt that is unbowed despite what he has seen and documented with his camera. And as you watch you too will witness the horrors and atrocities that he documents with an almost superhuman humanity and compassion. And it is that humanity that makes this movie so viewable and so moving.
Virtually all the images presented were shot in black and white. As an amateur photographer myself, I was stunned at how Salgado was able to frame his shots. He comments on the magic that comes when the camera captures that singular moment when someone looks into it and reveals the essence of who they are. His shots of the men who put out the burning oil wells in Kuwait convey more than words can describe.
It was after visiting Rwanda and shooting images of the aftermath of the genocide that Salgado decided that he’d had enough, seen enough, too much really, of what is so often called man’s inhumanity to man, and he returns to his grandfather’s ranch in Brazil. But here too, human activity has devastated the land. No longer is there a rainforest, the cattle have vanished, and the landscape seems as bleak as his inner state of being.
Yet somehow, he and his wife mange over the next couple of decades, to restore the land and, in the process, their souls. By the end of the film, I felt I had witnessed a miracle.
Click here for a sampling of Salgado’s work.
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