Manakamana

Description

High on a ridgeline in the heart of the Nepalese foothills lies Manakamana, a Hindu pilgrimage site once accessed only by a winding mountain footpath. Today, the sacred temple is more easily reached via cable car. This gondola’s interior is the unlikely setting of Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s carefully crafted observational documentary Manakamana. Embedding themselves and their ever-watchful 16mm film camera inside the cable car, the filmmakers patiently record passengers’ journeys up and down the steep hillside. As it happens, the film magazines of the camera—whose gentle thrumming is heard continuously within the gondola—last roughly as long as the 10-minute ride, enabling a contained structuralist meditation on the trip to the lofty mountain shrine. Ultimately, the boundaries of the cable car give way to contemplation as the rhythmic cycle of the voyage forms a recursive envelope of prayer, birdsong, sustained silences, idle chatter and the startling clamor of the gondola cab passing over tower junctions. The twinned observer—film camera and audience—is slowly attuned to the simplicity of human gesture and expression, an inward space wherein the passage of time and the montage of the film itself are elided and fused by mantra-like repetition. –Paul Meyers

Trailer

Film Details