After college, Fricke moved to
Santa Fe, New Mexico, and made a 16mm short film about a narrow-gauge railroad for the Narrow Gauge Railroad Preservation Association. After serving as
director of photography for
Koyaanisqatsi (1982, directed by
Godfrey Reggio), Fricke directed the
IMAX films
Chronos (1985) and
Sacred Site (1986). He became attracted to the format after watching
To Fly! in Washington, D.C., while working on
Koyaanisqatsi. He directed the purely cinematic non-verbal non-narrative
Baraka (1992), designing his own
65 mm camera equipment for the feature, and earning broad critical acclaim. He also designed and constructed new time-lapse mechanisms to achieve camera movement while filming at a very slow frame-rate. Fricke worked as a cinematographer for parts of the 2005 Star Wars film
Revenge of the Sith, shooting the eruption of
Mount Etna in
Sicily for scenes of the volcanic planet
Mustafar. He was also an early collaborator with Francis Ford Coppola on the director's multi-decade-long project,
Megalopolis, in the 1980's. ==Filmography==