The Salt of the Earth

The Salt of the Earth is a 2014 documentary. A lot of black and white photographs, they follow each other while there is a voiceover explaining what is behind these photographs (it is sometimes difficult to grasp who cause in the film, it could be Wim Wenders, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado or his son). Sometimes there are excerpts where we see the photographer, archive images, it’s sometimes in color, it sometimes happens nowadays. We will follow, over time, the photographer’s reports, famines in the Sahel, Mali (1985), Ethiopia (1986), Gulf War and Kuwait (1991), genocide in Rwanda (1994), war in the former Yugoslavia (1994 -1995)…

MESSAGES

Artistic

The choice of a man who drops his job in the economy to embark on the artistic, in connection with the desire to produce. A creator produces according to who he is, his story. We are shown how we can be mobilized by artistic projects, how we can design them over several years and then move on to something else (La main de l’homme. Exode. Génésis). Photography. The work of a photographer, his life, his way of seeing the world and many of his photos. We can here wonder about the transmission of information by the image. Aesthetics. We can only be surprised by the beauty of the images which sometimes show horrible things, however, it is difficult for the viewer to be in this feeling. Hurry.

Activism

Here the photographer says that his work was thought to criticize or highlight what can happen on the planet.

Work

This photographer will find his calling. You can see hard work, but for many of the people shown in these photos, surviving is almost already a job.

Adventurer

We are shown that this photographer dared to put himself in danger, visiting unlikely places.

Poverty

We are shown humans who have a rather miserable living condition. This photographer wanted to show the misery of those who can sometimes not be seen (migrants, minors, victims of famines…).

Industrialization

With ” man’s hand“, we can clearly see the contrast between what we live in our industrial societies and these worlds where men are still well surrounded by nature (for example the Papuans who seem to rarely have the opportunity to rub shoulders with technology).

Journey

We are shown different places on the planet (Russian arctic islands, Papua in Indonesia, different places in Brazil. Monopolizing work. We clearly explain that for the child,

Ecology

We are shown that the photographer needed to revive an entire dry mountain, to replant trees there. He thus rediscovered what made the charm of the landscape he knew when he was a child and was able to replant 2 million trees. Nature. With his work “Génésis”, Sebastiao Salgado wanted to put nature at the center of his images, and it’s beautiful.

Depression

We understand that this photographer’s work can destroy a man by dint of rubbing shoulders with horror. He explains to us that it was by saving the earth that he managed to free himself from the suffering of what he had seen.

Family

The film was also made by the son of the photographer, there is the idea of ​​staging the grandfather, the parents, of the children, of talking about what makes things important, because even if the we are a great artist, we are also a parent. Couple. We see the importance of the couple in the life of a man, even at the professional level. We see his wife always very present in her work. Disability. We talk in a nice way about Salgado’s second child who has Down syndrome.

Contemplation

The images remain on the screen for enough time so that we can have enough time to contemplate them.

Movie theater

We talk inside the film how the director got together with the son of the photographer to produce this film.

Dead

We dare to show dead people (and even babies). We are told about death, it is often shown as something difficult (it must be said that we see people starving, skeletal or murdered). War. Here we see the effects of war on civilians.

DIFFICULT SCENES

Faintness

We will find ourselves faced with poverty, and if we do not really realize what these open pit mines are in Brazil, the agglomerate of humans who are there is strange. We are surprised to find these images beautiful, but at the same time they can be horrible, difficult to detach from them.

scary visual

It is especially the images of starving and even starving people that are difficult to bear, the looks, the children, the repetition, the situations, there are really hard times. He will show us different famines

Complexity

Not necessarily easy for children to understand who we are talking about in the documentary, and who is talking. Length. Seeing fixed images in this way does not follow the rhythm of current productions, you have to accept a form of contemplation.

VOCABULARY

Classic. Music can be scary just to create tension.