ARGENTINE CINEMA: AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD—Lisandro Alonso On La Libertad

"Film must provide audiences the opportunity to discover questions."—Lisandro Alonso.

La Libertad (Freedom, 2001) screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, and scored nominations and wins on the film festival circuit, including the FIPRESCI prize. The son of a cattle rancher and disinclined to carry on with the family business, Alonso was a 25-year-old recent graduate of the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires when he made La Libertad; "outside of Buenos Aires but within Argentina." Alonso met the film's protagonist Misael Saavedra on his father's ranch. Misael, logger by trade, epitomized non-urban youth for Alonso; his reaction to the then-popular trend in Argentine cinema to revel in urban narratives. Perhaps it was Alonso's rural background that granted him familiarity with Misael's incommunication?

Alonso spent eight months in the Argentine Pampas with Misael. It was a difficult cohabitation because they had little in common to talk about; but, slowly, they developed a trust. Once he gained Misael's trust, Alonso proposed making the film. Fueled by his anger that his film proposals were not being considered by the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires, Alonso took on La Libertad independently. The shoot consisted of 10 days with a 12-person crew. The film remained "in the box" for eight months because neither friends nor family liked it. He was frustrated. But then—unexpectedly—La Libertad became a festival darling.

Alonso's method of filming consists of long takes (usually four minutes) which he restructures in the editing room, making minor manipulations to create—as he puts it—"strange expressions of natural everyday things." The result is—as the Harvard Film Archive program capsule describes—"a poetic meditation on labor and landscape."

James Quandt observed in his insightful essay "Ride Lonesome": "So matter-of-fact and uninflected is the film's recording of Misael's daily routines (faithfully re-created from weeks of Alonso's close observation of the man's actual life and edited so that several sequences seem to adhere as real-time) that La Libertad has been hailed as the apotheosis of Bazinian realism."

Quandt further tracked that at Cannes "the film elicited inevitable claims that the boundary between fiction and documentary had been blurred, collapsed, or straddled." Alonso, however, argues that La Libertad is not a documentary, though he grants audiences the sovereignty to think however they want about the film. He stresses his concern is more with the point of view of the audience than his own.

The issue of labor chafes against the film's title. "La Libertad subtly questions the 'freedom' and identity alternately gained and lost by the daily burden of hard labor," the Harvard program capsule concludes. At Slant, Ed Gonzalez notes that "the film's long takes and the cyclical, labored nature of the man's daily grind force the spectator to question the nature of freedom." At Parallax View, Jay Kuehner comments: "Clearly, here was a director who had denuded his cinema down to its sheerest essentials, and what remained was a nominally minimal but ultimately voluptuous portrait of a beautifully forlorn landscape inhabited rather efficiently by a man and his work. Nature, and civilization. The banal, and the mythic. The story was not new—who hasn't worked an arduous day's labor at some time? But the grammar with which it was told was. Radically so." At Elusive Lucidity, Zach Campbell wonders whether the title is ironic: "Is the protagonist, Misael, free in the nature of his labor and solitude, or is he burdened by its necessity?" "The irony," Robert Koehler concludes at Film Journey, "is that there's nothing absolutely Argentine about La libertad. Its freedom is a freedom from nationality, time-space, narrative laws, camera laws and the expectations that audiences instinctively impose on themselves. But pay attention to the actual translation of the Spanish title: 'Liberty'—a harder, more profound word than 'freedom,' a word pointing to a greater leap, a commitment to an ideal, an identifier for an equation that even describes its opposition—oppression. Liberty is harder-won. Liberty is that thing that the films that really matter aspire to. This one just has the balls to take it as its own name."

In the film's final "quietly confrontational" sequence, Misael munches on roasted armadillo and then stares directly at the audience "as if"—Ed Gonzalez suggests at Slant—"daring us to question or challenge the integrity of his way of life", or what Sean Axmaker describes as "the integrity of the quotidian." "As if" becomes a convenient way to extrapolate Alonso's otherwise notoriously withheld motivations. Alonso admits that by encouraging Misael to look directly into the camera, he deconstructed documentary expectations and created a direct relationship with the audience. Alonso simply told Misael to "act" as if were looking at someone who was eating across a table from him.

The film's original ending had Misael laughing outloud while looking into the camera—achieved by Alonso unexpectedly dropping his pants; but—persuaded by the Cannes Festival to (as Quandt puts it) "remove this Brechtian breach"—Alonso settled for the somber, more atmospheric ending.

Many critics of the film have suggested it would have sufficed better as a short; but, aware that no one recovers costs on a short film, Alonso chose to make a feature in hopes he might recover some of his family's investment. His father was the film's producer.

When La Libertad premiered at Cannes, one of the critics from Cahiers du Cinema complained that Alonso treated his non-actor Misael like he was a monkey. "I'm sorry to tell you, but he's wrong about how I direct my actors," Alonso asserted defensively. "I'm not trying to make any money from the films. I'm not trying to use them." He knows he's working with non-actors and has to develop specific approaches with them. He can't ask them to behave like professional actors. Nonetheless the question of Alonso's artistic sincerity clouded the film's Cannes reception. As Jay Kuehner summarized at Parallax View: "The question persisted whether Alonso's film was, to reduce the argument, an act of abstract humanism. Was it possible that esteemed auteurs held a kind of deep faith in their wounded protagonists yet had little regard in reality for their more immediate brethren?"

Cross-published on Twitch.

MEXICAN CINEMA—Alamar (To the Sea, 2009)

Straight off, Adam Nayman deserves some kind of commission for convincing a small squadron of film journalists to catch Pedro González-Rubio's sophomore feature Alamar (To the Sea, 2009) at its last public screening at the Isabel Bader. Boasting its world premiere in TIFF’s Visions sidebar, Alamar was already part of my scheduled coverage of this year’s Latin American fare, but it’s always heartening to share a viewing experience with such accomplished journalists as Andrew Tracy, Danny Kasman, Fernando Croce, Darren Hughes, Girish Shambu, Richard Porton and Dan Sallitt. Talk about fraternity! Though I didn’t quite agree with Nayman (or Danny Kasman at The Auteurs) that Alamar was the "find of the festival"—for me that honor fell to Oscar Ruiz Navia's El Vuelco del Cangrejo (Crab Trap, 2009)—I could certainly understand their shared enthusiasm for Alamar's pellucid simplicity. "Pedro González-Rubio," Kasman writes, "has found a documentary subject and turned it into a lovely, modest, and sweet fiction of the real world." In a word, the film is beautiful, with stunning aquamarine cinematography contributed by Alexis Zabé (Silent Light, Lake Tahoe).

Mexican Jorge (Jorge Machado) and Italian Roberta (Roberta Palombini) have fallen in love and given birth to Natan (Natan Machado Palombini), now five years old; but, their relationship can’t endure their contrasting temperaments so Roberta has decided to return to Italy with the boy, but not before allowing him the chance to spend quality time with his father and grandfather Matraca (Nestor Marin). Jorge seizes the opportunity to take Natan to Chinchorro, Quintana Roo, home to the second-largest coral reef on the planet and one of the few places in the Mexican Caribbean with an intact ecosystem. Living simply in a wooden palafite (a shack constructed on stakes) in front of the quay, little Natan eases into a fisherman’s life, acclimating to the natural world alongside his father and worldly-wise grandfather. Linaje (lineage) and a sense of knowing one's origins becomes a father’s parting (and lasting) gift to his son.

So what is it that makes this spare tale so resoundingly resonant? Is it that Alamar achieves fiction without narrative intervention? During the Q&A following the screening, González-Rubio was asked the inevitable question: is Alamar a feature film or a documentary film? He responded quite honestly, "I think of it as just a film." Circumventing strict categories, and suffering no delimitations, Alamar forges its own waters. As filmmaking, it recalls Antonio Machado's poetic assertion that there are no paths at sea, only wakes.

In a serendipitous bit of elucidation, Mark Peranson provided advance copies of the Fall 2009 issue of Cinema Scope to press attending TIFF and—perusing same on the flight home to San Francisco—I was quite delighted with Robert Koehler’s essay "Agrarian Utopias/Dystopias", which more than aptly captures the spirit of Alamar in its exploration of "the new nonfiction" or "the cinema of in-between-ness." Koehler writes of a "zone of a cinema free of, or perhaps more precisely in between hardened fact and invented fiction" that "permits all manners of wild possibilities", especially with regard to nuanced observations "specifically applied to subjects about humans working on the surface of the earth." Koehler's essay addresses the suspicion posed during the Q&A that Alamar was neither fact nor fiction: "This deliberately contradictory nature is a fundamental part of these films' essence. If any finding is made at all, it is that the categories are finally quite pointless."

Indeed. How could it be otherwise? How else could the poignancy of a film like Alamar be so evocatively articulated? The profound sadness at the heart of the separation between father and son, between a boy and his native country, echoes the "overwhelming sadness at the process of collapse and the end of things, alongside the unspoken drama of human beings stuck in a cycle with no escape." Marriages collapse, families fall apart, lineages are disrupted, and only memory can soothe distance and rupture; the memory, perhaps, of a befriended cattle egret who flies into the film—and into the lives of its "characters"—as if to remind that one need go no further than an observation of the natural world to find a story that will last a lifetime; a story whose heart is perhaps not fiction but unadorned observed truth.

10/25/09 UPDATE: Alamar swept the audience and jury prizes at the recent Morelia Film Festival. Produced by Mexico’s Mantarraya Productions and Xcalakarma Films, Mantarraya will handle Mexican distribution for Alamar, with France’s MK2 as the film’s international sales agent.

01/03/10 UPDATE: In his Senses of Cinema Toronto dispatch, Dan Sallitt agrees with me that—though Pedro González-Rubio's documentary hybrid Alamar "generated a surprising amount of critical buzz during the last days of TIFF"—he "somewhat preferred another Toronto premiere with a wilderness coastal setting, Oscar Ruiz Navia's El Vuelco del Cangrejo (Crab Trap)."

Sallitt writes that Alamar's story—"slight to begin with"—"almost vanishes behind the didactic mission of the project, as the son's learning experience is entirely coincident with ours. The film has considerable travelogue appeal, and the beautiful natural light and waterscapes of the Chinchorro region create an idyllic atmosphere. But director Pedro González-Rubio's documentary-style hovering camera doesn't do very much to organize the experience; and the issues accompanying the father-son relationship are too suppressed even to be called latent."

Cross-published on Twitch.