Manakamana review – more art installation than cinematic experience

This fixed-camera portrait of a cable car travelling up and down the hills of Nepal to the Hindu temple of Manakamana is a work of art – in that it may be better served in a gallery, where it would doubtless prove a thought-provoking installation. In cinemas, the latest prize-winning offering from Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (whose output includes Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s hypnotic Leviathan) proves a somewhat patience-testing experience; two hours of unedited segments of 16mm film in which we stare at a series of passengers – a couple carrying a chicken, an American and Nepali woman discussing photography, two sarangi players tuning and playing their instruments, women struggling to eat melting ice cream, all studiously ignoring the camera and its operators – while the scenery rolls repetitively by. Some of our companions talk of the hills, the corn, the new houses and the old trek path that they spy out of the windows. Others sit in silence. Drawing initial inspiration from Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s work on Are We There Yet (aka Railway Sleepers), Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s film aims to “capture some part of the ebb and flow between … the body and the spirit, the sacred and the profane”. Certainly, one begins to wonder how this modern transport has changed what must once have been an active pilgrimage into a strangely passive experience, the spectre of sacrifice (a carriage-load of goats, the aforementioned chicken) mundanely mechanised. If only the viewing environment were more suited to casual contemplation, allowing the audience (like the passengers) to dip in and out of the car in 10-minute stretches.