The Fence (Le Cri des Gardes)

 

Director Claire Denis

THE FENCE (Le Cri des Gardes)      B                                                                                 France  Senegal  USA  (109 mi)  2025  d: Claire Denis

Claire Denis goes back to her roots for this one, an adaptation written by Denis, Suzanne Lindon (daughter of frequent Denis actor Vincent Lindon), and Andrew Litvack in an English language version of the 1979 allegorical play by French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès, who was inspired by Samuel Beckett, that depicts a tense nocturnal confrontation between white managers and black laborers at a British multinational construction site at an isolated, neocolonial outpost in West Africa, where colonial plantations with soldiers have now been replaced by corporate work contracts in a film deeply rooted in symbolism, decidedly more abstract than most of her other work.  During a trip to Lagos, Nigeria in 1978, Koltès witnessed a black workman die at a construction site, an event that drew little concern from the white foremen, which forced him to confront the casual racism and violence that Europeans directed toward Africans.  Denis met Ivory Coast actor Isaach de Bankolé while she was writing the screenplay for her first film Chocolat (1988), which was shot in Cameroon where Denis grew up as the daughter of a French colonial official and starred Bankolé, discovering he was a close friend of the playwright, starring in three of his plays before Koltès died of complications from AIDS in 1989, which is how she discovered his plays, where one in particular stood out in her mind, Black Battles with Dog, as it connected to her childhood of growing up in Africa.  In Nigeria, specifically a construction site, Koltès discovered English is spoken between whites and blacks, where the excessive politeness and distinct use of the word “sir” belies the racist anger and hidden violence that lies underneath the surface just simmering to explode.  Denis is a French director who spent much of her childhood in West and Central Africa colonial outposts, which deeply influences her films, exploring themes of colonialism, isolation, and the complex relationships between Europeans and the African continent, where this is her fourth film set in Africa, including Chocolat (1988), a semi-autobiographical depiction of her childhood in colonial Cameroon, Beau Travail (1999), visually exploring the rigid, ritualistic lives of the French Foreign Legion, confined to their base in Djibouti on the northeast African coast, and White Material (2009), where Isabelle Huppert plays a stubborn French coffee farmer refusing to flee her colonial land during a civil uprising from an unnamed, war-torn African country.  Continually subverting expectations, what these films have in common is native black African cultures being wiped out by white European influences, fueled by hypocrisy and corruption, often through racist male privilege and toxic masculinity, which runs rampant throughout this film, with a Tindersticks musical cue taken from her earlier film WHITE MATERIAL, Tindersticks "Children's Theme" -- Claire Denis Film Scores ... YouTube (2:04), that plays over the end credits, eloquently described by Denis, “This piece of music broke my heart at that time,” noting that using it “once was not enough,” Watchtowers in the Wilderness: Claire Denis on “The Fence”.    

The film opens poetically with an African mother laying a palm leaf on a pool of blood in the desert sand, while there’s also CGI references of a snarling white dog viciously attacking pieces of human organs.  Two African brothers lay shirtless in the sand side by side, but only one appears to be alive, Alboury (Isaach de Bankolé), evoking a parable about a biting dog before concluding, “White man’s fantasy are the black man’s nightmare.”  Following themes of racism, colonialism, and gender, this is a film that dares to confront uncomfortable truths about Western exploitation and power dynamics, as we are introduced to a non-local white engineer named Cal (Tom Blyth), seen driving a truck while boisterously singing along to a Midnight Oil song from the 80’s, Midnight Oil - Beds Are Burning (Official Video), HD ... YouTube (4:33), a rock anthem on Aboriginal land rights that asks, “How do we sleep while our beds are burning?”  We soon find ourselves in a massive industrial refinery outpost of strung-together shipping containers and looming oil drums surrounded by barbed wire, with armed guard towers watching over, where the African guards speak to one another in the Yoruba language, which is fairly widespread in West Africa, but completely indecipherable to most whites living there.  The stage is set with the introduction of a world-weary construction supervisor Horn (Matt Dillon, a close friend of Isaach de Bankolé), who out of the corner of his eye sees an African man smartly dressed in a suit and tie pacing just on the other side of the fence, Alboury, who speaks Yoruba with the guards, allowing him entrance through the first gate, portrayed with a quiet intensity, announcing he’s there to claim the body of his brother, Nouofia.  The ever-evasive Horn, a picture of colonial arrogance, claims he died in a construction accident, an all-too-common occurrence, but it’s a horrible tragedy, cordially inviting the man to join him for a whisky where they can discuss the matter.  But Alboury does not budge, politely refusing the offer, claiming he wants the body as soon as possible as their mother is in mourning, crying and wailing relentlessly, which he aims to stop by bringing the body.  Horn is willing to accommodate his request, even offering a small sum of money, described as “funds of retribution,” but not until the next day, which Alboury deems unacceptable, as Western style negotiations are worthless with someone who is fluent in the language of oppression.  The entire film surrounds this non-negotiable impasse, with the film’s title operating on multiple levels, with a visible fence that separates the construction facility from the surrounding community, but the larger barriers are invisible, reflected internally by each of the characters, as the film shifts from the filmmaker’s usual impressionistic style to a more direct approach.

Like Jean Genet and other absurdist writers, Koltès felt exiled as a homosexual in a heterosexual world, while also growing painfully aware of his own skin color and the repressive history and the power structure it represents in Africa, where land and resources were plundered by European colonial powers, completely ignoring native interests and cultures, fueled by centuries-old racist beliefs that blacks were ignorant and subhuman.  The dangerous and unpredictable Cal is seen again picking up a woman at the airport, Léonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Horn’s recent wife arriving from London, adding further psychological strain to the volatile environment.  A lone woman in an all-male landscape, much like Isabelle Huppert in White Material (2009), she quickly becomes an object of desire, whose mere presence is provocative enough, but her revealing attire and stiletto heels add another layer of intrigue and sexual tension, as the men see only one thing – sex, with an always condescending Cal drinking the couple’s celebratory marital champagne while continually pestering her and nonchalantly coming on to her, even in the presence of his boss who sent for her, like the mail-order bride in François Truffaut’s MISSISSIPPI MERMAID (1969).  Cal represents the archetypal racist colonizer, whose violent rage is activated by Nouofia’s perceived disrespect by wanting to leave an hour before closing time, and later, when he sees Horn negotiating with Alboury, he worries that the foreman will sell him out for the deadly way he handled it, where even the idea of his boss listening to a black man pisses him off.  Examining the racial root of this barbaric act of violence shows the lengths men will go to in order to make a bad situation even worse, where the opening dream sequence features Cal’s lost dog.  Shot in Senegal by Éric Gautier, the longtime cinematographer for Olivier Assayas and Alain Resnais, while also shooting the two previous Denis films, Both Sides of the Blade (Avec amour et acharnement) (2022) and Stars at Noon (2022), this can be read as a fable about the evils of neocolonialism, yet there’s still plenty of underlying poetry, worlds of ambivalence, and multiple layers of ambiguity.  The slow-moving film is about an encounter built on desire, hatred, and frustration among three men and a woman divided by everything, as there’s simply no place for her there, which becomes apparent almost immediately, as the fortress-like look of the place resembles a prison, keeping natives from intruding, yet also keeping those residing there trapped inside, amplifying the psychological tension.  This is a dialogue-heavy, tense study of space and shifting power dynamics between white occupiers and black laborers, where the fence in the film acts as a border between the privileged white compound and the local African workers, representing deeply ingrained systems of post-colonial exploitation.

Set in a largely abandoned construction site where they pave roads through the bush for economic development, with bulldozers and hastily constructed barracks, the atmosphere, unfolding mostly at night, is dreamlike, deeply psychological, bordering on the supernatural.  At night, the guards, all of them black carrying automatic weapons, in order to keep themselves from falling asleep, would call out to one another with strange melodic sounds, which is what made Denis decide to call it The Cry of the Guards (Le Cris des Gardes), the first adaptation of a play and the first movie she ever shot in sequence, mostly defined by a nocturnal space, which she believes best suits what Koltès had in mind.  Koltès understood that writing in the name of Africans would redouble the colonizer’s violence, so instead he presents Alboury as the colonizer’s nightmare, one who answers the most human call for mourning, but who ends as a powerful and uncompromising avenger against white oppression.  While the workers try to normalize the death, claiming it’s something that happens all the time, Alboury’s refusal to capitulate to the white demands alters our perception, forcing viewers to look beneath the surface, as this begins to feel more and more like a cover up, with echoes of Greek tragedy, as Alboury’s spectral-like presence acts like a Greek Chorus, like a persistent force of moral consciousness, eventually viewed by his white counterparts as an act of aggression, bringing to bear something that doesn’t really exist within the compound, namely any sense of justice.  This takes the film into deeper philosophical levels, becoming a morality play, where the outsider, Léonie, learns as we learn, as it’s not at all what she was led to believe, including the man she presumably loves, discovering she is completely unprepared for this environment, as she watches the disaster play out before her in a haunted space filled with a mix of desire and terror.  There are any number of different directions that might be imagined in our heads as we’re watching this, but the film refuses to abide by convention, feeling more like a poetic allegory, with Horn and Cal managing their own fears and isolation, which immediately brings to mind Valerio Zurlini’s film THE DESERT OF THE TARTARS (1976), which is about the relentless psychological torment from an outpost on the edge of nowhere where an isolated platoon sits awaiting the threat of attack from an unseen enemy.  Haunted by a lurking dread of an impending sense of doom, Horn and Cal are exacerbated by a similar fear of the unknown, psychologically projecting their own fears into the minds of others, which eats at the inner core of these men who literally unravel before our eyes, living in a world abandoned by time. 

Nuestra Tierra (Our Land)

 

Director Lucrecia Martel

director on the set

Mercedes Sosa

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NUESTRA TIERRA  (Our Land)                 A-                                                                          aka:  Landmarks                                                                                                                      Argentina  Mexico  France  Netherlands  Denmark  USA  (123 mi)  2025  d: Lucrecia Martel

This film works with our mother tongue and its racist complexities, which prevent many from accessing a vital space.  The language of documents.  The lives of people expelled by papers of dubious value, lives lost in hours of useless procedures.  A historical document is the script of a scene that never existed, but that suits those who sign it.  Here, cinema can be useful.                  —Director Lucrecia Martel

Lucrecia Martel is a largely self-taught queer director who is part of a New Wave of Argentinian filmmakers coming after decades of political and economic crises, including a brutal Dirty War military dictatorship responsible for the disappearance of 30,000 people between 1976 and 1983, which remains prominent in collective memory, opening up new avenues to explore what was previously forbidden.  After gaining acceptance to the country’s only state-sponsored film school, the National School of Film Experimentation and Production (ENERC), with only 30 accepted out of more than a thousand applicants, just as classes were about to begin the school shut down due to lack of funds, leaving her on her own to follow her pursuits, which meant she simply immersed herself into watching and analyzing as many films as possible.  After winning a public script competition, this led to one of her first short films, THE DEAD KING (REY MUERTO) (1995), a feminist western about a woman who escapes her abusive, alcoholic husband with her three children in a small town called Rey Muerto, exhibited in Argentina as part of a larger omnibus film, a collection of short films from all across the country, something that was unprecedented at the time, as it showcased a compilation of new voices.  Since then, Martel has gone on to make four features, LA CIÉNAGA (2001), a masterwork of claustrophobic cinema, THE HOLY GIRL (2004), a coming-of-age psychological drama, THE HEADLESS WOMN (2008), a metaphysical ghost story about Argentina's refusal to acknowledge a widening economic disparity between the middle and lower classes, a trio known as the Salta Trilogy, each having been filmed in her home province and focusing on women and girls who operate outside the social norms, followed by Zama (2017), a period commentary on colonialism and masculinity.  Martel began working on the film in 2010, so if anything ZAMA is the sequel, yet if the extensive credits indicate anything, there was a massive amount of research and more than 400 hours of film to comb through.  Her first feature in eight years, a scathing rebuke to the atrocities of colonialism, past and present, Martel denounces how Argentina has been built on the plunder of indigenous peoples and how history is actually a fiction, a systematic construction of lies meant to conceal and legitimize crimes.  For the director, a country cannot be built on plunder and injustice, where hundreds of years of history have been systematically erased.  The real question this films asks is why do these things happen, as the filmmaker is committed to returning to this indigenous Chuschagasta community what has been stolen from them, their stories and their images, drawn from about 5000 photographs, some, very moving, taken by Javier Chocobar himself, a man at the center of a murder investigation.  Martel is known for her elliptical storytelling, sensory sound design, and hypersensual cinema, with a focus on class and colonial decay, immersing viewers in intimate, humid spaces, leaving out standard exposition for avant-garde techniques, forcing the audience to figure out what is going on.  Martel’s atmospheric films can sometime do the unthinkable and unimaginable as they explore the moral, physical, psychological, and social decay of characters willfully blind to the historical violence and the continuing social costs that pay for their privilege.  Rarely using background music, where the sound design offers a richer meaning, her subtle, minimalist films often take place in her native Salta, Argentina, the province just north of Tucumán, where the hot, sticky environments act as metaphors for social inertia and trapped desire.  It’s important to point out that in Spanish, “Nuestra tierra” means both “our land” and “our Earth,” something that gets lost in the English translation.  This is a film that not only counters the nation’s official history, but is most remarkable in revealing how that truth has been fabricated.

In her first documentary feature, Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel investigates the 2009 murder of indigenous activist Javier Chocobar, who was shot and killed while defending his community’s land and from being forcibly evicted from their land by a local white landowner Darío Amín, a wealthy rancher and miner and two former police officers, one of whom can be heard on a video recording, “Nobody listens to them in court,” leaving two other community members seriously wounded as well.  Alternating between footage of this controversial, long-delayed (9 years after the incident) trial, which hinges on a shaky cell-phone video, testimonials from Chuschagasta community members who have called the Tucumán Province in northwest Argentina their home for untold generations, and aerial drone footage of the stunning province Chocobar fought to defend.  What’s truly unique about this film is how it not only puts the accused men on trial, with footage of public court testimony, but the entire country of Argentina on trial through extensive research into the thefts of land over centuries, turning bureaucracy into a weapon that entirely sanctions murder of indigenous life, expanding into a searing examination of centuries-old colonial violence, eviction, land exploitation, and cultural erasure that continue to shape Latin America today, essentially turning indigenous communities invisible and wiping them off the map with proclamations that they no longer exist, while then opening up their lands and resources to the highest bidder.  Co-written by Martel and María Alché, who was the star in THE HOLY GIRL, working with historian Milena Acosta, the film poses the question, who really owns the land, which once belonged exclusively to the indigenous until colonialist intruders took the land by force, literally stealing it right out from under them with no legal consequences, as the law typically ignored indigenous rights, where the country never faced investigative scrutiny - - until this film, which starts out as one thing, examining what happened in the killing of a Chuschagasta leader, questioning the evidence and court testimony in this specific case, where at one point, we see Chocobar’s widow pleading, “Is God a witness to all this?”  Martel then broadens that search into an existential question of who really owns the land, as those who claimed to hold the titles obtained them by unscrupulous means, through land auctions by sellers who never actually held them either, an egregious example of state-enabled land theft, premised on the fiction of Terra nullius, or “nobody’s land,” that has justified the colonial invasion of indigenous lands for centuries.  To the Chuschagasta community, no one person owns the land, as it belongs to all of them.  It’s a bit surprising when the actual murder trial begins asking these unanswerable questions, with historians brought in to describe the evolution of bogus titles, while the indigenous communities themselves have lived on that land for as long as they can remember, providing photographs, family memorabilia, and personal accounts of growing up there, where even the native people were unaware they were indigenous.  “We were taught what the books said,” as according to Argentine history, the indigenous peoples, those who were called the “indios (Indians),” disappeared after the Spanish colonization, yet their existence is undeniable, with Martel paying cinematic tribute to people who were systematically erased from history, revealing how the historical fractures of Argentina continue to manifest in the present.  History has been present in all of Martel’s earlier films, all but this one taking place in the northwest Salta region, yet this happened just 300 kilometers from where she lives, where so many have indigenous heritage, but never explored with this degree of investigation that incorporates meticulous historical research.  Since the end of the military dictatorship, the reconstruction of democracy has depended on an ongoing public and political negotiation of just what constitutes history.

Because historians denied the very existence of indigenous peoples, perpetuated by the Church and academics, this opened up avenues to legitimize land appropriation, leading to collusions between landowners and the police, as farmers and developers were allowed to harvest the land, using indigenous workers as unpaid labor, basically stealing their crops and animals, and then charging them for it.  As it turns out, the three men who happened to visit the Chuschagasta community land were land developers there to drive the native community off the land they had been living in for almost 400 years to recover a mining quarry located in the center of their territory.  This is a tactic that had been used for decades, so for generations, this is what indigenous communities faced and were used to, acknowledging that as soon as the developers indicated they just wanted to talk, this was a sign that they would eventually lose something, as they never just wanted to talk.  Implicit in these tactics is the underlying belief that the indigenous have no sovereignty on their land, that white privilege allows them to take what they want.  And on this occasion as well, the day of the murder, this is how the conversation began, yet these three were also the only ones to bring guns and use them, firing nine shots, threatened by the larger crowd that was gathering, though no one, not a single individual, was armed, used force, or actually threatened them in any way, as they simply witnessed what was happening, and took pictures, which was the best way to deal with developers who want to conduct their business in private, out of sight and away from any accountability, where they could simply take what they wanted by force, incident by incident, thoroughly convinced of the righteousness of their cause, and in the inferiority of the native peoples, an example of racism, paternalism, and infantilization.  No legal channels had ever stopped this type of conduct and behavior before, but this murder was different, as there were so many witnesses, even a jagged cellphone video that was presented at trial, allowing the entire world to see for themselves and make their own determination, though once a series of shots was fired, the camera remained fixed on the ground, where all you can hear are screams, heavy breathing, and the chaotic sounds of a physical struggle.  This wider scope, as well as the filming of the trial, and a recreation of the crime scene itself, which drew plenty of publicity, with the police flying their own drones, placed a different kind of pressure on the courts, where “the whole world was watching,” to quote Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), so it required that they dig a little deeper in their examination of who really owns the land, and just what constitutes a crime.  Martel deviates from anything resembling standard documentary filmmaking, allowing the Chuschagasta community to speak for themselves, offering a heavily archived rebuttal to the axiom, “history is written by the victors,” creating a visceral space that lets viewers absorb the racist, colonialist complexities of the legal and social systems in Argentina, connecting the past and present.  Opening with NASA space station images of Earth accompanied by the Kyrie from Misa Criolla, composed by Ariel Ramírez and sung by the legendary Argentine folk singer Mercedes Sosa, Mercedes Sosa - Misa Criolla - Kyrie YouTube (5:02), an indigenous woman from Tucumán, and a member of the communist party, forced into exile in Europe after facing censorship, arrests on stage, and severe death threats from the military regime in Argentina.  Martel chose this piece because it represents the Catholic faith embraced by the local indigenous communities, yet sung by a non-believer, and, to an Argentine ear, highlights an indigenous voice, perhaps for the very first time.  By the end of the film, we hear her sing another song about the land, a beautiful homage to the working class, nature, and the dream of justice and peace, Mercedes Sosa - Cuando tenga la tierra HD (Alta Calidad) YouTube (3:38)

This actually recalls a similar languid style of Chilean filmmaker Marcela Said’s The Summer of Flying Fish (El verano de los peces voladores) (2013), where the visualization of the immense landscape is paramount, drawing attention to its vast permanence, where its primordial existence came long before any human beings set foot, creating this elusive realm that is difficult to understand, as it existed in all its glory before any human communities were established.  But once schools, railroads, and newspapers began telling tales, stories were told only from the point of view of the colonial invaders, never from the indigenous people who actually lived there.  To that end, this film is eye-opening, beautifully shot by Ernesto De Carvalho, as it tends to accentuate the land through extensive drone footage sweeping across the mostly untouched hills and valleys, where cows or horses may be seen in their native habitat, yet after a bird smashes into a drone, things suddenly appear upside down, suggesting the truth may be more complex and harder to comprehend than we realize.  This extreme visualization draws viewers into the subject matter, allowing the land itself to become a central character, where the question of “ownership” becomes a touchy subject, as Argentine citizens once legally “owned” slaves from the 16th to the 19th centuries, having brought them across an ocean to their shores to perform most of the heavy work, living in brutally harsh conditions where they had no rights whatsoever, but were routinely punished or shackled for the most minor infringements.  There are no books in school that were told from the point of view of the slaves, as they were not allowed to read or write, so their historical perspective, like the indigenous, was never told.  Earlier this year, Argentina made international news for being one of only three countries (the other two being Israel and the U.S.) to vote against a UN resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade a crime against humanity (The myth of white Argentina still shapes the nation | Slavery), while in November 2024, Argentina was the only country to vote against a United Nations draft resolution on indigenous rights.  Some from the indigenous communities described the long distances and dangerous river crossings they had to endure just to get to school, where they were continually abused and disrespected and treated like garbage, yet they exhibit no hostile or angry reaction, as they are essentially peaceful and adaptable.  Their input is invaluable in this film, as it exposes an entire culture that has been declared dead and remained invisible for centuries, yet behind these individual stories, which have never been told, there are literally hundreds of thousands of other stories behind them, without which today’s voices would never be heard.  While Argentine President Javier Milei has systematically defunded the INCAA, Argentina's National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts, as his government is very much against cinema and its new generation of filmmakers, Martel has raised a topic that is absolutely crucial to her provincial region, opening a dialogue with an otherwise silenced indigenous collective memory that is historically marked by plunder, placing in the foreground the social cracks of Argentina.  For Martel, cinema is “a tool of transformation,” where this is a deeply humane documentary posing legal and existential questions that really have no answers, forcing viewers to make their own determinations.  One of the most memorable shots takes place inside a massive Catholic church, where one of the stained glass panels exhibits a shot of God hurling thunderbolts at the presumably “bad” indigenous people, as if by divine order, to make way for the Argentinian heroes.  And while this may not be what anyone would describe as a riveting account, with plenty of meandering along the way, as if getting lost in the questions, this does have a unique and distinct point of view that makes it essential viewing.