Spray and Velez limit themselves to working with large and unwieldy building blocks, Stonehenge-hefty hunks of footage. Their camera is always held to a fixed position, inside the cable car that transports Hindu pilgrims and tourists to the Manakamana Temple at the top of a Nepalese mountain ridge. Each shot in their film runs as long as a 400ft magazine of 16mm film, which is to say around 11 minutes. This is also, as it happens, the length of time it takes for the cable car to reach its destination: two mechanical apparatuses running in concert, individually going about their repetitive rounds.

The first half of Manakamana is devoted to ascents. Sometimes the camera is directed towards the face of the verdant ridge the car is advancing on, sometimes away from it, so that the valley the car has left is seen rolling away in the background.
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