In Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell calls the movie theater “a special temple where the hero has moved into the sphere of being mythologized” (Campbell). Watching the movie Baraka, the audience can connect to Campbell’s description of the didactic nature of movies. According to its co-director Fricke, Baraka was intended to be "a journey of rediscovery that plunges into nature, into history, into the human spirit and finally into the realm of the infinite" (Fricke). Furthermore, Baraka dives into the didactic elements of archetypes and images that instruct the soul. Although Baraka does not use words, there is a clear message of humans and their world that Campbell says gives “relevance to something happening in your own life. It gives you …show more content…
Baraka travels to Cambodia to portray the horror that the Communist Party of Kampuchea, or Khmer Rouge, ensued on their people during the reign of Pol Pot, their communist leader. The movie shows evidence of humanity’s brutality on not only nature but also on itself through shots of one of the sites where people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge in attempt to institute domination and control against those who dared to oppose their rule. The site, known as S-21, “The Prison of No Escape,” was a high school transformed into a torture, interrogation and execution center of which only seven people survived out of the 14,000 who entered.As more people were tortured to their horrifying death, mass graves filled with skulls of the victims at this killing field and many others served as a remembrance of mankind’s ability to destroy themselves and the audacity that humanity has to kill their own people. Because people always have the desire to be in control, their lust for power drives them to selfishly take and collect it from other sources including from their own. Cambodia’s genocide was a means for the communist party to absorb mass amounts of power. Each person that was tortured and killed under the hands of the Khmer Rouge added to the fear amongst the …show more content…
As mankind begins to feel the need for something to hold on to that they are unable to find in society and their government, they turn to nature and religion, the two things that they rely on to create a sense of hope and relief when there seems to be none. In Baraka, one way that god and nature show their competence is through religious customs, beliefs, and traditions. Shots of people bathing in the Ganges River in India depict the power of the natural world because of the religion of Hinduism’s belief that there is a sacred essence and aura in the water that flows through the river. The Ganges is a representation of higher power because of its divine nature and consideration that God, or Lord Shiva extends into and lives within the river. Millions of Hindus plunge into the waters of the river to wash away their sins and seek repentance in order to cleanse the sins that they believe to have accumulated in past and current lives. These sins as a collective would require them to continue the repetitive cycle of death and rebirth until they became fully purified. Consequently, as shown by the Hindus bathing in the Ganges River to cleanse away their sins, humanity relies on nature and God through religion in order to mend the impurities and mistakes of mankind that cannot be fixed by the hands of man. Although human nature is to neglect the natural environment to
Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Face does Beowulf qualify as a mythic hero. Beowulf qualifies as a mythic character for many different reasons. Campbell’s stories share a lot of the same topic with the mythic creatures like in the story the belly of the whale. A hero was swallowed and had to find his way out. Beowulf and his village was being attacked by a creature who could not control himself.
Deep River is a short novel through which Shusaku Endo shares the story of a number of Japanese tourists who travel to India in an unknown pursuit of their pilgrimage of grace. Ironically the characters within the novel are non-believers of the Hindu religion, which can be a bit confusing for the reader at first. But as one proceeds through the novel, one will come to realize that the basis of the novel was not to review any particular religion, but to depict the individual journey to God. As stated within the novel, “God has many different faces. I don’t think God exists exclusively in the churches and chapels of Europe…(p.121)”Meaning similar paths will most likely not be taken. However it becomes evident through the reading that it is their sub-conscious notions that lead them to India to find God, although their trips appear to be for alternative reasons.
Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot-the leader of the Khmer Rouge followed Maoist communism, which they thought they could create an agrarian utopia. Agrarian means that the society was based on agriculture. They wanted all members of society to be rural agricultural workers and killed intellectuals, who had been depraved by western capitalist ideas. A utopia means a perfect society. This idea went to extremes when The Khmer Rouge resumed that only pure people were qualified to build the revolution. They killed Cambodians without reasons by uncivilized actions such as: cutting heads, burying alive… There were about 1.7 million people killed by the Khmer Rouge.
Although the two genocides are quite different at a first glance, they are interestingly similar upon deeper inspection. For starters, the Holocaust is best known for it’s brutal and inhumane treatment of prisoners, such as tattooing a number on their arm against their will and feeding them food that is not even fit for dogs to consume (“Holocaust”). It may be shocking for some people to hear that in Cambodia, it was just as atrocious, maybe even worse. During the Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975 most Cambodians were forced to leave their homes on such short notice that numerous families were killed on cite for not evacuating quickly enough. Those ‘lucky’ enough to escape immediate death were forced to work, unpaid, in labor camps until the fatigue wore down their immune system and they died of some wretched disease (“Genocide”). Another intriguing similarity betw...
The Cambodian Genocide and the Holocaust are unique in the areas of reason and aftermath effect. Hitler wanted to create a “Master Race” (“Holocaust”), also he wanted to exterminate the Jewish population because he believed they “hindered” population growth (“Some”). Pot wanted to deconstruc...
Heracles favorite of the Greeks is a primary example of Joseph’s Campbell’s hero’s journey, proven by all the actions that Heracles has done during the span of his Life.
An Analysis of the Ten Stages of the Hero’s Journey in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Daniel Goldhagen (2009) states that in less than four years, Cambodia’s political leaders induced their followers to turn Cambodia’s backwards and regressing society into a massive concentration camp in which they steadily killed victims. Furthermore, a deeper understanding of the Cambodian genocide is provided within Luong Ung’s personal narrative, “First They Killed My Father” (2000). Ung’s memoir is a riveting account of the Cambodian genocide, which provides readers with a personalized account of her family’s experience during the genocide. She informs readers of the causes of the Cambodian genocide and she specifies the various eliminationist techniques used to produce the ideological Khmer vision. Nonetheless, she falls short because
Many of the stories that have been told for centuries, or have recently been created, incorporate the story of a young innocent character who embarks on a journey and becomes a hero, known as The Hero’s Journey; a series of steps that all heroes follow. This journey not only shows the main character becoming a hero but also shows the hero move along a path similar to that of adolescence, the path between childhood and maturity. The Hero’s Journey was created by a man by the name of Joseph Campbell. He wrote a book called The Hero with One Thousand Faces, a novel containing a variety of stories that follow the steps of the Hero’s Journey. One famous creation that follows The Hero’s Journey is the science fiction film trilogy: Star Wars, created by George Lucas. Lucas depicts the struggles that take place along the path of adolescence through the story of a protagonist Luke Skywalker, who strives to become a Jedi Knight to show that Campbell’s Hero’s Journey reflects the struggles that youth go through whether they are depicted in a story or not.
Long ago, in the desert of Egypt, Hebrew slaves known as Israelites escaped from the tyranny of the pharaoh. This story has a common theme that an unlikely hero leads people out of a wasteland and into a place of new life. The Israelites heroes' name was Moses. There are several attributes that his quest shares with Joseph Campbell's theme of the journey of the spiritual hero, found in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Departure, initiation, and return are all part of the journey. Moses' journey will take him away from his familiar surroundings, separating him from all that he knows, so that he can return to perform the tasks God commanded him to complete.
The Communist Party of Kampuchea, also known as the Khmer Rouge, took control of Cambodia on April 17, 1975, which lasted until January 1979. For their three-year, eight-month, and twenty-one day rule of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge committed some of the most heinous crimes in current history. The main leader who orchestrated these crimes was a man named Pol Pot. In 1962, Pol Pot had become the coordinator of the Cambodian Communist Party. The Prince of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk, did not approve of the Party and forced Pol Pot to flee to exile in the jungle. There, Pol formed a fortified resistance movement, which became known as the Khmer Rouge, and pursued a guerrilla war against Sihanouk’s government. As Pol Pot began to accumulate power, he ruthlessly imposed an extremist system to restructure Cambodia. Populations of Cambodia's inner-city districts were vacated from their homes and forced to walk into rural areas to work. All intellectuals and educated people were eradicated and together with all un-communist aspects of traditional Cambodian society. The remaining citizens were made to work as laborers in various concentration camps made up of collective farms. On these farms, people would harvest the crops to feed their camps. For every man, woman, and child it was mandatory to labor in the fields for twelve to fifteen hours each day. An estimated two million people, or twenty-one percent of Cambodia's population, lost their lives and many of these victims were brutally executed. Countless more of them died of malnourishment, fatigue, and disease. Ethnic groups such as the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cham Muslims were attacked, along with twenty other smaller groups. Fifty percent of the estimated 425,000 Chinese living in Cambod...
The Hero’s Adventure was created for the reflective professional struggling with engaging students in reading and writing. This guide focuses particularly on the works of Joseph Campbell. The story that will be examined in this guide includes: The Hero’s Adventure. Students are taught how to close read, identifying symbols, themes, identify hero’s in mythology, and character analysis in a short story. Students will compose a daily journal that will be shared and turned in as a final project at the end of the unit. An outline of the journal prompts and grading rubric is included in the appendix.
The Cambodian Genocide has the historical context of the Vietnam War and the country’s own civil war. During the Vietnam War, leading up to the conflicts that would contribute to the genocide, Cambodia was used as a U.S. battleground for the Vietnam War. Cambodia would become a battle ground for American troops fighting in Vietnam for four years; the war would kill up to 750,00 Cambodians through U.S. efforts to destroy suspected North Vietnamese supply lines. This devastation would take its toll on the Cambodian peoples’ morale and would later help to contribute that conflicts that caused the Cambodian genocide. In the 1970’s the Khmer rouge guerilla movement would form. The leader of the Khmer rouge, Pol Pot was educated in France and believed in Maoist Communism. These communist ideas would become important foundations for the ideas of the genocide, and which groups would be persecuted. The genocide it’s self, would be based on Pol Pot’s ideas to bring Cambodia back to an agrarian society, starting at the year zero. His main goal was to achieve this, romanticized idea of old Cambodia, based on the ancient Cambodian ruins, with all citizens having agrarian farming lives, and being equal to each other. Due to him wanting society to be equal, and agrarian based, the victims would be those that were educated, intellectuals, professionals, and minority ethnic g...
In this essay I will examine how Gilgamesh would be an example of Campbell’s hero. I will first introduce Joseph Campbell and his “hero”. By summarizing and analyzing the story, I came to the conclusion that Gilgamesh is a good example of a hero. I will point out in the text what lead me to that realization and explain the journey of the hero.
Humanity is a part of nature (not apart from it) and everything returns to the earth in the end. In what is my favorite sequence of the film, Baraka takes us to the Ganges River in India. We see the masses gathered at the river bank engaged in various rituals; some bathe, others worship. The Ganges is sacred in Hinduism, a religion centered on the idea of birth and rebirth. A bath in the river is spiritually cleansing, and can even help you escape the endless cycle of birth and rebirth. It is here, in the Ganges, that the story comes full circle. There is life in the river (bathers, worshippers), and there is death (cremations, funeral rituals). Tellingly, Baraka revisits the scenes of religion from the beginning of the film at this point. We see scenes of followers of Abrahamic religions gathered in worship, followed by images of empty temples and mausoleums, and concluded with an image of a single floating candle on the Ganges (a funeral ritual). Religion is not exempt from the cycle of life and death. Of course, death is not the end. There is always rebirth, and the film ends with time-lapsed shots of structures and landscapes imbued with a sense of awe, concluding with an image of the starry night