Wheel of Time is gentler than many of Mr. Herzogs other documentaries exploring the physical and psychic limitations of human experience. In standing back and commenting dryly on scenes of mass devotion, he lets the spectacle speak for itself. In one scene, the pilgrims nearly riot as monks toss dumplings that are supposed to bring good fortune into the crowd. In a kind of sidebar, Wheel of Time also depicts the pilgrimage to Mount Kailash, the 22,000-foot Tibetan mountain sacred to Buddhists and Hindus. Each year, thousands trek the rigorous 32-mile route around the peak, at an altitude of more than 17,000 feet. For those who perform prostrations, the journey can take more than four days; some die from exposure. Mr. Herzog may be a sympathetic observer, but he is no proselytizer. Spiritual enlightenment and the embrace of emptiness dont come easily; noble as these goals may be, they are only for the hardiest of spirits. [...] Talk about the sands of time. As a visual metaphor for the impermanence of life, the magnificent, fragile Kalachakra sand mandala, also known as the wheel of time, is a kind of meticulously orchestrated mirage; first you see it, then you dont. A symbolic spiritual map for imagining the steps to enlightenment, its creation is a central ritual of the Kalachakra initiation, the 12-day process in which Tibetan Buddhist monks are ordained. Its assembly and eventual destruction - the sand is poured into a bag, then scattered as a blessing - is the cycle around which the German director Werner Herzogs absorbing documentary Wheel of Time is structured. The mandalas creation is shown twice in the movie, first in Bodh Gaya, in northern India, where Mr. Herzog shot most of the film with a 16-millimeter camera in 2002, and then the following year at an exhibition hall in Graz, Austria. On both occasions, the Dalai Lama is present, although in India a serious illness precluded his full participation. Mr. Herzog is even granted a brief interview with the Dalai Lama, who speaks in soothing generalities about how each of us is the center of the universe and how all religions seek the same thing. But Wheel of Time is less about words than about being plunged into an intensely devotional world, feeling its tug and sensing its extreme austerity. The movie might as well have been called An Immersion in Tibetan Buddhism. With minimal explanation, it puts you right in the center. In the first step of the mandalas creation, a ceremonial string is dipped into liquid chalk and plucked to form the initial lines of a design that is seven feet in diameter when completed. This blueprint is laboriously filled out with depictions of 722 Buddhist deities along with Sanskrit syllables, all drawn with multicolored sand, deposited through slender funnels meticulously tapped by the monks to release a tiny stream. The finished mandala is so delicate that when shown it is usually protected by glass to shield it from human breath. In Bodh Gaya, half a million pilgrims travel hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles to gather in a sprawling tent city for the Kalachakra initiation. Their trek is made more arduous by the fact that many arrive on foot, with every step interrupted by a body-length prostration. One monk, whose forehead is injured from touching the ground thousands of times, declares ecstatically that this punishing ritual taught him the size of the earth. [ nytimes/2005/06/15/movies/15whee.html?_r=0 ]
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 08:33:05 +0000
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