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  • courtesy of MPI Home Video

“Samsara” is a Sanskrit term that suggests the endless flow of life and death in the material world. It’s a core concept in Indian spiritual traditions, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism. Samsara is the trap of the waking world, from which we can only awaken through enlightenment.

The film Samsara, new to DVD and Blu-ray this week, is an attempt to evoke this cosmic concept by way of music and motion picture images. It’s a non-narrative documentary, a visual essay, or — in the words of director Ron Fricke — “a guided mediation on the cycle of birth, death and re-birth.”

But, hey — don’t let that scare you off. Above all, Samsara is a visual wonder with world-class cinematography that rivals anything bankrolled by the BBC, National Geographic or Discovery. Director Fricke has been working in this vein for a while and he knows what he’s doing. He directed the similarly-themed Baraka in 1992, and before that was cinematographer for director Godfrey Reggio’s pioneering Koyaanisqatsi in 1982.

The film begins with Tibetan Buddhist monks assembling a sand mandala, an intricately designed abstract pattern created over the course of days, grain by grain (literally). The sand mandala ritual is intended to suggest the world’s transience and impermanence, and the rest of the film can be considered an expansion on that notion.

In the film business, Fricke is an acknowledged master of time-lapse photography and much of Samsara is built around this technique, now familiar from a thousand nature documentaries. Here, Fricke takes things to another level. As he films a particular scene — carved stone faces in the desert, say — he moves his camera in tiny increments over 12 or 24 hours. The result is a 10-second sequence in which the camera appears to be meandering through the scene at a tourist’s pace. But clouds speed overhead, stars wheel in the night, and those ancient stone faces stay utterly still and serene.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a sequence like that is worth a thousand sutras. Fricke pulls off similar magic tricks throughout the film, juxtaposing images and using his cinematic toolbox to have his way with time and space.