The Salt of the Earth

Salt of the Earth, the latest feature from director Wim Wenders, chronicles the work of the seventy-year-old Brazilian social documentary photographer and photojournalist Sebastião Salgado.  Salgado’s images give us an inside view of extreme conditions in often remote areas of the over 100 countries to which he’s traveled.  Most of his striking black-and-white pictures depict poverty, famine, and greed; genocide, war, and displacement; or the destruction of environments and individual human beings. As disturbing as many of his photographs are, they’re also hauntingly beautiful, and distinctive in their ability to capture emotion and convey narrative. Truly an eyewitness to history, Salgado has documented dozens of major global events and their aftermaths with the kind of aesthetic acumen that differentiates an artist from a journalist.

Wenders is the ideal filmmaker to create a portrait of Salgado. The internationally renowned director—a singular voice who emerged from the dynamic 1960s New German Cinema movement—is a filmmaker, playwright, documentarian, author, and photographer who shifts effortlessly between mediums, styles, and subjects. Though best known for his Palme d'Or winning narrative features, the American drama Paris, Texas (1984) and the German romantic fantasy Wings of Desire (1987), he’s also made a name for himself documenting virtuoso musicians, artists, designers, and directors—most famously with the Cuban music/performance “making of” film Buena Vista Social Club (1999) and the German 3D dance/performance biography Pina (2011).  Salt of the Earth begins as a simple first-person documentary in which we learn how Wenders first experienced Salgado’s work and met him, but it quickly transforms into a meditation on the themes contained within Salgado’s frames, and a subtle examination of how each project effected the photographer’s life. 

Salgado’s oldest son Juliano serves as co-director and we get the sense this was a full-bodied partnership, with each filmmaker’s different perspective on (and history with) the subject informing the resulting picture.  Yet Salt of the Earth only hints at many of the intriguing personal details of Salgado’s story. We learn, for example, that his work often took him away from his wife Lélia and their two young sons for many months and even full years at a time, yet they remained an intact family unit with Lélia an active collaborator and driving force behind most of Salgado’s projects. Wenders and his co-director hold back enough first-hand information to keep us curious, just as they seem to know exactly how long to linger on the photographs to allow comprehension without ever letting us get lost in any single image.

The documentation of the worst facets of humanity seems to have been Salgado’s life mission for most of his career. Many critics and commentators have accused him of objectifying the suffering of others, or even of creating “grief porn” for well-heeled intellectuals.  Interestingly, the film never mentions any of these negative views on Salgado or his work. Like their subject, the directors choose to eschew the “well-rounded” journalistic approach to documentary in favor of a more direct and personal perspective—a decision I found entirely appropriate.

The images and stories in the film present a challenge to the viewer, yet Salt of the Earth never feels oppressive or heavy-handed. The final chapter covers Salgado’s serendipitous midlife shift in focus—a powerful and unexpected counterbalance to all the suffering he’s witnessed. This uplifting final act, which explores a kind of rebirth for Salgado in terms of his views on the world, in no way undercuts anything that came before. It simply provides the necessary tonal balance all good documentaries possess. Wenders’ mastery of storytelling in multiple forms and formats enables him to craft this beautifully structured movie. Many documentarians could learn a lot from Wenders' simple techniques (see Laura Poitras’ Citzenfour, the film that beat Salt of the Earth for 2014’s best feature-length doc Oscar, as an example of a strong, important work of non-fiction that suffers from an inability to discover a compelling third act).