Salt (2009, Michael Angus and Murray Fredericks)

Not to be confused with the 2010, Angelina Jolie, action blockbuster of the same name; the 2009 documentary short, Salt is an altogether different film.

Salt is the story of award winning and universally acclaimed Australian photographer, Murray Fredericks, who makes a yearly pilgrimage to the centre of Lake Eyre's vast, 3,700 square mile area of salt flatland, in the Northern corner of South Australia. After travelling to what can only be described as one of the most featureless landscapes I have seen on film in some time, he sets up his camera, and captures those moments where the land and sky intertwine. This is a trip that Fredericks has made for six years now (at the time when this film was made), and he spends his time there waiting for those moments where the vast abyss of the land and sky create an otherworldly, alien experience. 

For a film which is roughly half-an-hour long, it is fairly well structured and surprisingly well layered. I must admit that, early into the film's running time, I thought this was little more than a travel-doc, puffing up a sensitive "artiste's" self image. My perception of the film changed, and Fredericks himself, changed once we are shown his monotonous and tedious daily routine, like having to constantly avoid storms and keeping his lenses clear. By capturing Fredericks' routine, we are not necessarily getting depth from him, but it does allow us to sympathise with him, since the routine allows him to seem more human. In the last half-an-hour of the film, he reveals that the motivation behind travelling to a part of the world with no civilisation came after receiving a cluster of bad news at the age of 26. Within the span of about a month, he discovered that his parents were getting divorced, not long after his father had recovered from cancer, and, on top of that, his then girlfriend, whom he had a child with, was leaving him. This resulted in him temporarily going blind in one eye and not leaving the house for several months.

By attempting this journey every year, he is searching for himself, and searching for something more profound, all while staring into the wide, open abyss. This is a trope which is familiar in narrative, fictional cinema, but it is just as profound in documentary cinema, such as Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World. Fredericks likens it to "staring into the abyss", which is of course magnified when the particular abyss he is staring into just happens to be a fantastic and beguiling sensory experience which is constantly changing, depending on the weather or time of the day.

Then there are the flats themselves, which, quite frankly, engulf one's vision with their vast beauty; so much so that Fredericks runs the risk of playing second fiddle to the natural beauty he is attempting to capture, which I suppose is fairly fitting, but I doubt it is deliberate. One particular fascination of filmmaking, which has become very popular since the rise of websites such as Youtube or Vimeo, is that time-lapse videos have become very accessible and widespread online, and the film contains several minutes of time-lapse. On one hand, there is really nothing particularly unique or interesting about a time-lapse of a beautiful landscape; especially since a quick search on Vimeo would give me thousands, if not tens of thousands, of time-lapses just as impressive. On the other hand, these are stunning to look at and, as audience members, it is perhaps the only opportunity we are going to get to see these flats in this particular light.

If there is a flaw, it is that, while eventually becoming an interesting piece of work, it does come across like a paid advertisement for Fredericks' photography (which is stunning, judging by the pictures shown during the closing credits). Even as the darker layers are revealed, there is little to the film which has not been better explored by many other filmmakers. It certainly is not bad, it just feels inessential and better suited to television; which is inevitably where it went, after American television channel, PBS made it part of their documentary series, P.O.V. There is also the nagging sense that, had Fredericks' journey taken place anywhere else, there would not really be a film at all, since a lot of the film hangs on the stunning photography and the beauty of the salt flats.

Although, having said all that, if the film is a little shallow, there are a lot worse subjects to centre a short documentary on, as Fredericks is an affable, genuine seeming man. All in all, there are plenty of worse ways to kill half an hour, and we are presented with a good example of a man staring out into the void and finding that the void stared back at him. Other than that, it lacks a uniqueness which could have made something like this truly breathtaking.

7/10