Critics reviews

Though its subject matter doesn't seem particularly fun on the surface, Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez's Manakamana is a sort of structural game, by turns contemplative and, yes, playful. It sets hard and immovable rules in place, then explores what is cinematographically possible within those constraints.

The film's rigidly confining parameters paradoxically activate a heightened sense of awareness: I became increasingly attuned to small shifts in the passengers' facial expressions and body movements, in the landscape behind them, in all the things that normally go rolling by unnoticed in all the moments of our lives. Most amusement park rides overwhelm you in sensory overload; this one brings you back to your senses.

Manakamana is such a rich experience in part because of how ingeniously it both activates and resolves a host of apparent contradictions. Shot with a camera that is fixed (tripod-mounted to a custom-built platform) but also in constant motion, it is at once a portrait film and a landscape film, an epic in miniature, a documentary predicated on performance.

It stands as a supreme example of anthropological cinema, applying observational rigor to cultural groups and traditions, a direct inheritor of the early experiments of Jean Rouch but aware of the much older stream that extends back to Robert Flaherty, arguably the creator of the first anthropological in-between films.

MANAKAMANA's rich sound design draws the viewer in to the car's cabin, projecting the sound-space of the journey into the auditorium, subsequently allowing the audience to project themselves into the cable car alongside the passengers onscreen.

...Manakamana is more to do with the journey happening outside the box, and about our being placed inside the box with the people we're accompanying. Which makes the film closer, in way, to Warhol's screen tests. Or indeed, like Stagecoach. Manakamana is a travel film that's not about the ride, but the riders. Ourselves included, of course.

Presenting Manakamana at last fall's New York Film Festival, Spray called each episode "a whole ethnographic encounter in real time." It might be more precise to say that this hypnotic and serene motion picture allows the viewer to experience what that thing "real time" really is.

The movie is being released digitally but its luxurious visual quality, with its near-tactile sense of texture and depth, owes much to it being shot on film... By focusing on such a narrow slice of Nepali life, Ms. Spray and Mr. Velez have ceded any totalizing claim on the truth and instead settled for a perfect incompleteness.

Manakamana" is, in important ways, different, and better [than previous Harvard SEL films], because the enforced intimacy of its premise invites precisely the sort of controlled, analytical observation—and discussion—that those films lacked... [But] there's nothing in the movie to suggest the presence of the filmmakers, no sense of the participants' consent to being filmed, no notion of their interactions with the filmmakers or any organizers of the production.

It creates, through the aesthetic uniqueness of its vision and through the transformative power of cinema, a shared experience that did not exist before, in real life or on film. Indeed, what's majestic about Manakamana is that by making you focus on what's onscreen it forces you deeper within yourself. It's the closest I've seen a film come to an act of genuine hypnosis.

We might say that nonfiction, at its best, shows us the world in a way we've never seen it before — usually by homing in on some peculiar facet of existence and illuminating its idiosyncrasies. But the subject of Manakamana is existence itself, in all its sprawling, endless banality. It shows us the world sitting still for 10 minutes at a time, quiet in the company of men and women and the forested vistas around them. And I've never seen anything like it.

Whenever the passing verdant landscape vanishes into ethereal cloud cover, it's as if we're moving between states of being. In this context, the most mundane conversation might suddenly take on a metaphysical grandeur, while every moment of silence feels fleetingly precious. You could hardly ask for a more beautiful vision of souls in transit.