'Over twenty years they planted 2.7 million trees.'
The Salt of the Earth, by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado
Film by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. Review by Helen Porter.
This 2014 film, which chronicles the life’s work of the photographer Sebastião Salgado, is a hard watch. The camera is pitiless, presenting horrific images – corpses in Rwanda, skeletal bodies in the Sahel – but with deep humanity and empathy.
Salgado was brought up on a cattle farm in Brazil, but found a vocation as a photographer. He began long travels, drawn particularly to areas where humanity was suffering – to marginal communities from the Inuit to the Yanomami, immersing himself in their lives. The film was made in co-operation with Wim Wenders, and combines Salgado’s stills, Salgado himself speaking of his experiences, and Wenders’ filming of him, in co-operation with Salgado’s son.
The film begins with astonishing photographs of the open pit gold mine in Serra Pelada, Brazil. Thousands of men struggle up vertiginous ladders, with sacks of earth on their shoulders that may contain specks of gold. These men are former farmworkers or industrial workers, but also intellectuals, students, university graduates. It is a scene of the most abject exploitation, except these men are not employed, or enslaved, but have chosen to seek gold.
Salgado’s travels take him to famine in Ethiopia, slaughter in Rwanda and in Bosnia, and mass migrations. He chronicles the lives of working people, including a team of Canadian firefighters, among the many who came to help put out the burning oil wells Saddam Hussein left as he withdrew from Kuwait. For one phase of his work, ‘Genesis’, he recorded the landscapes and peoples most unblemished by ‘progress’, as his ‘love letter to the planet’.
But in Rwanda, Salgado saw and experienced pure despair. He emerged from this deeply wounded, convinced of the insuperable cruelty inherent in humanity, and despairing of its purpose on earth.
What healed him was returning to his family’s land in Brazil. The woods and pastures of his youth had long been de-forested, reduced to dust, the cattle left without grazing. At the suggestion of his wife Lélia, who has always been an integral part of his creative work, they began to replant the land, creating, as Wenders says, a major miracle. Over twenty years they planted 2.7 million trees. The Instituto Terra is now home to hundreds of species of trees and birds, and dozens of species of mammals, amphibians and reptiles. It has also had a huge impact on the ecosystem and climate. ‘The land was as sick as I was – everything was destroyed… thanks to this increase of the trees I, too, was reborn.’
So why should we watch? The film confronts us with the worst of humanity, and the most miraculous aspects of our world. Some images we can take courage from; some we must incorporate into our awareness. But we cannot turn away from any of them.
