La Libertad (Freedom)

 

LA LIBERTAD                    B-                   

aka:  Freedom

Argentina  (73 mi)  2001  d:  Lisandro Alonso

To me he’s a sage.  Someone who isn’t interested in society, who creates his own world.  People talk about Whitman, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and other names I’ve never heard of. 

—Lisandro Alonso, speaking of Misael, the protagonist of his film La Libertad

Narration is all but absent in Alonso’s first feature, where in his words, “I don’t want to tell a story.  I’m interested only in observing.”  The son of a cattle rancher, at the age of 25, Alonso decided to spend time in the country on land purchased by his father, taking him into Argentina’s Pampas region where he met the film’s protagonist, a tree cutter (hachero) named Misael Saavedra, spending 8 months with him before pitching the film to his former film school, Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires, immediately encountering resistance, as neither his family, his friends, nor his school liked the idea, so he financed it independently with $50,000 from family money, making his father the producer.  Using a 12-person crew, they shot for ten days, basically presenting a day in the life of Misael.  Told with lyrical power and a scarcity of information, the film is far from a documentary portrait, as you could imagine how this would be so differently presented in the hands of Werner Herzog.  Instead it resolutely refuses to provide any background information, where it’s 30-minutes into the film before a single word is spoken, providing an unflinching look at a man living a solitary life in the countryside, where the bold declaration of the title provides the viewer all they need to know, as it’s a question asked throughout the film, which is itself a conglomerate of fiction, documentary, and improvisation, where the camera, mostly in long takes, follows this young man around as he cuts wood with an ax and chainsaw, rounding up tree stumps, cutting off branches, marking tree trunks, then placing them all in a woodpile, as we see him walking through the high grass, even defecating in the woods, with the sounds of cows heard in background.  After a while he takes a break to eat, washing his hands, changing his T-shirt, warming up prepared stew in a pot, turning on a radio playing Latin Salsa music, while also gulping water and smoking a cigarette.  A rhythm of motion is established through simple means, and like the director’s other works, this exceedingly spare and minimalist film takes the form of a silent, solitary journey.

Misael greets a man and his son as they pull up in an empty pickup truck by his woodpile, loading the bare logs in his truck, while Misael rides in the back with a giant white dog panting all the way.  They get off at home, allowing Misael to continue by himself, reaching a rural lumberyard where he hops out and rolls a cigarette, where one hears the sounds of dogs in the distance as he waits for the owner to inspect his lumber.  Offering 15 stumps at two pesos each, he ends up selling them for one peso and 80 cents each, or 27 pesos (approximately $9 dollars).  After unloading his truck, he immediately spends 10 pesos on cigarettes and a cold soda, as well as a gallon of gasoline for his chainsaw that he pours into a plastic jug.  Returning the truck to its rightful owner, he heads off into the open fields, past cows and wheatstacks, disappearing into the treeline where he catches an armadillo, lugging it along with him as he ambles through the forest back to his tent.  Making a fire, placing a metal grill over it, he whacks the animal a few times before slitting it open and roasting it on the fire, skin down.  Later in the evening, he lights a pile of brush on fire in the woods before sitting down to eat his meal, illuminated by campfire, where the film opens and closes with mirror images of Misael eating the cooked armadillo with his knife, where lightning and thunder can be heard in the background, though at the end, he boldly eyes the camera with furtive glances before the film fades to black, showing the title sequence as the rains fall.  Interestingly, the credits actually play at the beginning, along with a bass-heavy, pulsating vibe of contemporary music by Juan Montecchia, where the opening credits to the glacially paced LA LIBERTAD and Liverpool (2008) both feature strangely uptempo music, where this is the first in a Lonely Men Trilogy that also includes LOS MUERTOS (2004) and Liverpool (2008), one of the more intriguing trilogies in contemporary cinema, as one wonders whether these solitary men operating in isolated rural regions, outside the constraints of society’s reach, are really more liberated, or does their extremely limited economic opportunity keep them in a neverending cycle of powerlessness and poverty?  While they answer to no one but themselves and have skills that allow them to survive in the wilds of nature, yet their silence is reflected in their absence of political power, remaining marginalized, and perhaps even exiled from the broader community that all but ignores them.  In a broader view, they may as well be invisible, which is why Alonso chooses to shine a light on them.      

The film screened at the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes in 2001, quickly becoming a festival favorite, largely due to its daring originality and almost complete absence of language, yet it is inexplicably listed as the #3 film of the decade by Cinema Scope magazine, Cinema Scope Top Ten Films of the Decade - Cinema Scope, which is a head scratcher, but an example of how well Alonso is received in critical circles.  Described as “a poetic meditation on labor and landscape,” the film is reduced to its barest necessities, which perhaps increases the observational focus of the viewers, with Alonso describing the experience, “It’s a mirror, but empty,” allowing each individual viewer to fill in the empty spaces with their own thoughts and reflections, projecting their own idea of liberty.  While the woodcutter is nearly self-sufficient, deriving his income and basic needs from nature itself, his isolation, however, allows him to be economically exploited, so that the wood that he cut so carefully ends up being sold cheaply, where he’s at the mercy of market prices set by the lumberyard.  Who’s to say they don’t continually take advantage of him, as he’s a small time operator, where the sale may even be off the books, as Misael is part of a continuing journey from nature to the market and back again, somehow balancing work and nature.  The film never romanticizes the labor, but this is the lengthiest section of the film, shown with cinematic realism, where the slow pace of the film seems to extend our time with a man alone in the woods, literally expanding our boundaries, taking viewers on a journey at the margins of civilization.  But like Flaherty’s NANOOK OF THE NORTH (1922), this is a staged reality, a kind of fictionalized documentary, starting and ending in the same place, creating a mythical structure of a routine day in the life, as if every day is pretty much like this one.  Because of the relationship between Misael and his environment, there is a fine line between loneliness and freedom, where there may be days when he speaks to no one, but remains at a distance, preferring solitude to socialization, becoming a prisoner of uncertainty, subject to a different kind of inner life, something the camera never sees, that each viewer themselves must discover.  As an art film, outside the guidelines of commercialization, the director has already escaped the norms of traditional film language, driven by a desire to establish his own artistic freedom, refusing to follow the paths paved by others, using a radical stylization that is both provocative and informative, which may be uncomfortable to many, where each new generation will have to decide for themselves the worth of this kind of artistic approach, but as a first feature, it’s rare.     

2015 Top Ten List #4 The Salt of the Earth

Wim Wenders (left) consulting with Sebastião Salgado

 

Juliano Ribeiro Salgado (left), his father Sebastião Salgado, and Wim Wenders

  

THE SALT OF THE EARTH              A-      
France  Brazil  Italy  (110 mi)  2014  d:  Wim Wenders         co-director:  Juliano Ribeiro Salgado

For German director Wim Wenders, it all came down to a photograph that he kept in his office for years, a black and white portrait from the mid 1980’s of a blind woman from Mali conveying a feeling of such profound depth and supreme sadness that it served as a constant reminder of the kind of power and impact that art can have on the human soul.  Shot by Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Salgado, this distinctive artistic voice becomes the focus of the film, much like Wenders’ earlier Oscar nominated documentaries BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB (1999) and Pina in 3D (2011), where Salgado literally narrates his life story in a film that examines his life and his work.  The project originated with his son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, one of the principal cinematographers attempting to make a documentary on the life of his father, eventually bringing in Wenders to offer perspective and help shape his overall vision.  The outcome is a work of maturity and profound significance, where the subtle influence of Wenders in helping to choose the photographs by Salgado that moved him the most adds a surprising depth, basically allowing the pictures to tell the story.  Born in the lush hills of Brazil where the rain forest connects to farmland, Salgado earned a master’s degree in economics and began to work for the International Coffee Organization, often traveling overseas for the World Bank, where it was his wife Lélia that introduced him to a camera, forming a working partnership, as she now edits and produces his work.  Developing an interest in photography while working in Africa in the early 70’s, most notably pictures he took in Niger, Salgado studied photography while living in Paris, initially working on news assignments before developing an interest in photojournalism, specializing in social documentary photography of workers in impoverished third world nations.  One of his first assignments was photographing as many as a hundred thousand mud-covered workers, in lines stretching as far as the eye can see, onto rickety ladders plunging into the depths of deep pits in a mammoth Brazilian gold mine called Serra Pelada in the 1980’s, a bleak metaphor for the brutal history of a Dante Inferno human hell on earth, where the unforgettable images resemble the opening Biblical era slave sequences in Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), showing the backbreaking efforts of workers slaving under the hot sun pressed in such close proximity to one another that they resemble ants in an anthill carrying packs of dirt on their backs, climbing up and down the precarious wooden ladders all day.  Because of the use of mercury in the gold extraction, the area is now contaminated and the mines abandoned, leaving a giant open pit filled with polluted water. 

Working on long-term, self-assigned projects that are eventually published as books, Salgado has witnessed some of the most extreme horrors of human experience—war, poverty, greed, famine, genocide, and disasters.  The film is largely a series of photographs shown in what is essentially a slide show narrated by Salgado speaking about the circumstances under which they were taken, reliving a certain autobiographical period of his life, like a film within a film, where the viewer gets the impression Wenders is examining a fellow documentarian reflecting upon his own work.  While there are lovely, poetic touches throughout, the film is a painstakingly meticulous Robert Flaherty style documentation of the bleakness of the human condition as seen through photographs that couldn’t be more sorrowful and mesmerizing, and while the voiceover narration provides perspective, it hardly matches the power of the images.  In the decades of the 80’s and 90’s, Salgado immersed himself into the middle of some of the most brutally terrible and disastrous events of our age, genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, relentless wars, famine, the pitiful human existence in overrun and medically plagued refugee camps, and large-scale environmental disasters like the burning of the oil fields in Kuwait.  Perhaps based on his economic background, he concentrates on how it is always the poor who are the most vulnerable and the worst effected, showing how easily the privileged class remains aloof and a safe distance removed from these catastrophes, where the weakness and ineffectiveness of the world’s response is equally calamitous, as people continue to go about their lives completely unaffected.  While Salgado and Wenders are obviously personally driven, self-motivated, and wildly passionate about their work, it remains an open question what effect, if any, their work has in influencing the rapidly changing world around them.  The global economy has had a remarkable effect internationally, where land and jobs that were once plentiful have dried up and all but disappeared, leaving behind a blighted stain of toxic pollution and personal horrors.  One can’t help but be dumbfounded by the gut-wrenching experiences Salgado continued to seek out, each one more devastatingly bleak and gruesome than the last, where he witnessed one African genocide after another, watching uncountable numbers of people dying right before his eyes, where despite his deep personal commitment to document these images, one of the few who did, the rest of the world inexplicably preferred to look away.  It’s hard to think of another film that makes such a compelling case for making the most out of one’s life, where one man puts himself on the line repeatedly, risking death and deprivation over an extensive period of time, immersing himself in the most horrible war ravaged regions on earth, using only a camera as his voice. 

While it’s hard to know just what drives the man or inspires his work, by documenting Salgado’s efforts with this degree of intense scrutiny, Wenders is immortalizing the power of his art, elevating his own artistic relevance in the process, as if making the case before the world of public opinion.  How can one choose to look away?  Perhaps more than presidents or political leaders, Sebastião Salgado has had an amazing influence on his fellow man, as there are few cameras around to witness human atrocities, few have gone through what he voluntarily witnessed and experienced, adding untold emotional layers of depth through the artistry of his pictures.  One assumes there is a moral imperative behind this work, that the camera has the power to offer a voice to the voiceless, that there is an unmitigated force of good behind every image, as each is so carefully composed in such a distinct social setting.  Who are the disadvantaged that still roam the earth?  Largely invisible in reality wherever they go, so far removed from the mainstream, they resemble the dinosaurs we read about in science books, all but eradicated and extinct in our mind’s eyes, where we’ve lost any personal connection to their “living” lives.  When did their lives start to lose meaning?  It was the documentaries of Robert Flaherty and others that brought these exotic images of people in such faraway places to life, where images we could never conjure up in our limited education and collective imaginations suddenly burst into life onscreen, adding depth and extension to our knowledge, perhaps questioning the playfulness of the filmmaker’s methods, but leaving no doubt as to the cultural accuracy of an ethnically different way of life.  Flaherty’s approach, like Salgado, was to live within an existing community, become familiar with their way of life, and understand their story, so to speak, “before” shooting the pictures.  Who knows what drove Salgado to some of the most extreme places on Earth, spending years on each individual project, like visiting a remote Amazon tribe, having a unique ability to befriend total strangers, becoming embedded within the culture depicted in each individual photograph, where decades later he still warmly remembers not just the context of the photo but the individuals he spent time with.  After three decades, Salgado returns to his native Brazil, retiring to his family farm, united with an adult son he barely knew while globetrotting around the planet, where he undergoes a regenerative rebirth of the spirit, transforming the drought-ridden, dried out lands around him through a major restoration project of building a new rainforest ecosystem, replanting specifically indigenous species native to the region, literally creating new plant life that had died and disappeared, a victim of global climate change, calling it his Genesis project, conceived as a potential path to humanity’s rediscovery of itself in nature.  While he may take solace in finding some degree of natural balance, where he can once again walk along the lush grounds, it’s the harrowing images of his life’s work that will remain imprinted in our collective subconscious, where seeing such large masses of war refugees is particularly disturbing, ghostly images of starving children, displaced people trekking across the Sahara, and they are the lucky ones that survived, where Salgado himself was moved to despair, expressing his outrage, “We humans are terrible animals.”  “Everyone should see these images,” he reminds us, “to see how terrible our species is.”  Somber and profoundly meditative, few films leave such a definitive cinematic impact afterwards.