The photographic camera, in its infancy, was believed to capture reality with such fidelity as no realist artist ever could, and so the movie through its history also saw realism as its special mission, and to this end the cinema for commercial consumption, on the one hand, pursued in its historical development the simulation of reality, first the sound in the talkies, then the technicolor, and more recently the wide screen and 3-D cinematography to encompass more of the real world, and, continuously favored, on the other hand, in the choice of subject matter, the narrative in the tradition of the novel, the realist storytelling, even in dealing with the material of documentation and of fantasy as in science fiction and digital spectacles. Various sound and visual effects and digital projection further enriched the cinemas presumed illusionistic character.
I found Jauja singularly remarkable in this regard, original in attempting a film that tries to be neither illusionistic nor novelistic despite the cinematically inevitable mimetic images, and it succeeds. First of all, it adopts the academy ratio rather the widescreen, which is the standard today, despite the panoramic landscape that the frame encompasses through the film. The frame, moreover, is given rounded corners going against the idea that what we see is fragment of the real world captured by the viewfinder; here, the image we see is an artifice. Jauja is also sparse with speech, with hardly any spoken dialogue in the main body of the film, and it is also parsimonious with music and other non-diegetic sound; and, little happens narratively, rendering the film excruciatingly boring to casual viewers. Without actions and events that develop a story, the images, staring at us, invite us to linger and experience imaginatively what is about to happen. This is poetry.
The first shot of any well-designed film serves as an intimation of the story and its mood in the film to follow, a sort of an overture. The first shot of Alonso’s Jauja (above) does more; it is, as we eventually find out, the summation of the entire film. Father and his daughter sit on the ground surrounded by a vast and open terrain. They sit close together but facing the opposite directions, they are close but apart, proximate yet distant, as she reads a book and he looks out toward the distance, alone together in the barren, forbidding landscape. The image expresses their mutual alienation most economically; as the film progresses we learn that this is what the film is all about.
The young daughter, fifteen as we soon learn, in response to her father’s ineffective caress leans on him and says that she would like to have a dog for her birthday. After a long pause, the father asks “What kind of dog?” and she explains “the kind of dog who follows me around everywhere.” The father is a general from Denmark who came to this South American hinterland to engage in the Spaniards’ territorial conquest in late 19th century. After a brief preliminary set-up in which we find the daughter elope with a young soldier, the film is the father’s seemingly vain search for her all over the wilderness, following her trail obsessively like the dog she wished for her birthday.
The endless pursuit, shown in interminable variations of the image of the man going round and round in the wilderness, is the substance of the film, and these images move slowly, and in their languid pace, engages the viewer to imagine, segment after segment, the potential narrative development. We are in suspense wondering what will happen next, and, given ample time, we keep thinking because we are never told. The images, in short, don’t illustrate the narrative, as films images conventionally do, but like framed paintings they only evoke narrative possibilities. Stated differently, the viewer, instead of being told a story, is teased into making stories. These are images that invoke imagination as no illustrative images in narrative films could. In this lies the peculiar richness and singularity of this film; it is a cinematographic poetry, an artistic construction only this medium and none other could create.
I’m looking forward to seeing Alonso’s earlier films — Los Muertos (2004) and Liverpool (2008).
The review this great film deserves--thank you! Much to think about in what you've written. "Like framed paintings they only evoke narrative possibilities," yes.
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