The screen is black. A mass of ambient sounds emerges to pull the viewer into an immediate state of hypnosis. Crickets and a plethora of other insects are making their voices heard. Cattle and roosters join in, birds chirping, all while the camera slowly spins around with the grace of a Hitchcock film. At first a bit disorientating, soon it's evident we're looking at the nighttime sky onscreen, clouds and stars all together to form a perfect symbiosis with the soundtrack. The camera settles, and some light appears on the horizon. As the sun rises, two trees prominently frame the scene. The camera pulls in slowly to take in an amazing image of a rural Mexican sunrise over a vast field of farmland — the color palate a hybrid of Van Gogh and Monet landscapes in one single, real-time, breathtaking moving image. It is now morning, and the film begins.
Award-winning writer/director Carlos Reygadas's latest film, Silent Light (Stellet Licht), gushes with pastoral beauty from its memorable opening shot. No cold, distant, computer-generated trickery on display here, simply the natural world photographed impeccably. The film had its Minnesota premiere screening, followed by a Q & A with Reygadas, Friday, April 25, as part of Cinemateca: Contemporary Film from Latin America at the Walker Art Center.
Reygadas, Mexico City-born filmmaker, began his university career in Brussels, studying and practicing law. During his time in Brussels, he would often go to the Museum of cinema to see as many as three films in one day. Heavily influenced by the works of Tarkovsky, Rossellini, Bresson, Dreyer, Ozu, and Kurosawa, he eventually decided he had to go to film school to be surrounded by the tools he needed to become a filmmaker. Pushed by a friend to make short films, and given a super-8 camera, Reygadas learned how to use the tools of cinema by "doing." He immediately knew what he wanted to shoot and was full of ideas.
From 1998 to 1999, Reygadas made four short films, learning how to draw storyboards, produce, write, direct, shoot, and work with actors. He honed his style during his early works: Adult (Adulte - '98), Prisoners (Prisonniers - '99), Birds (Oiseaux - '99), and Super Human (Maxhumain - '99).
Super Human, a six minute, 20 second short, deals with suicide (a popular subject in his features) and Reygadas's own questions regarding God. It opens with a narration. The main character remembers a conversation he had with his mother: If you commit suicide should you go to heaven? (Reygadas has said in interviews he feels it's a great human capacity to end our lives if we want.) His mother responds by telling him that what God gives us, only He can take back.
—Yes, but if God were
perfect he would not test us.
—Life is a
gift not a test.
I admired my
mother, but wasn't satisfied with these explanations.
The rest of the short plays out a scene at a beach, and shows a man tying himself down to be taken by the tide as a boy and his mother discuss an old story she used to tell him—leading to more frustration for the main character. Throw in an odd sexual encounter with the mother and the climactic death of the man on the beach, and you have the beginnings of a filmmaking talent whose career knows no bounds.
Japan (Japón), released in 2002 and screened at the Walker in 2003, won the Golden Camera Special Distinction at the Cannes Film Festival. The film, shot in grainy 16 mm, highlights many of Reygadas's strengths: shooting landscapes — it is shot in cinemascope (he got the idea from Gaspar Noe's I Stand Alone, the first film Reygadas saw shot with 16 mm in scope) with an anamorphic lens, squeezing the image and showing off the beautiful Mexican countryside and rolling mountains; his insistence to work only with non-actors and his ability to pull natural, realistic performances from them; big, biblical themes that ruminate in nearly every scene, but are culled from the minutia of everyday people living fairly simple lives; long takes that pull the viewer into the reality of the characters; little use of score, mainly using ambient sounds or diegetic music for the soundtrack; graphic sexual encounters featuring actors not typically seen in films having sex (i.e. old, unattractive, and fat people); focus on characters over story, and characters full of contradictions. All of his films feature extremely memorable opening and closing shots that resonate in the mind of the viewer and are inescapable from memory.
In Japan and his other two features, its obvious Reygadas has a fondness for his actors, and their characters in the film. But he also has deep respect for the audience, and isn't the least bit pretentious. He uses his films to speak truths about the human condition and reveal his philosophy on life, but never speaks down to the audience, instead choosing to show the action and let the viewers come away with their own interpretation.
Another common theme is his films' enigmatic titles. Reygadas hates titles, but realizes they're a necessary evil. He wanted to call Japan Untitled, like some of his favorite works of art, but couldn't bring himself to do it because he thought it would be "pretentious and horrible." He finished the film, concluding that it was about light coming after dark and the cycles in life, like the sun rising again. Three countries came to mind: Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. Ultimately, he thought Japan had the most significance to rising sun in the minds of an audience, so he went with that.
Japan follows a character known only as "the man" (played by Alejandro Ferretis, whose untimely death at age 59, in 2004, remains shrouded in mystery), a painter from the city looking to end his own life. He speaks bluntly. When asked in the opening why he wants a ride to a mountain he responds: "To commit suicide." When he meets a religious old woman named Ascen (Magdalena Flores) and asks to stay at her farmstead, a loving bond quickly forms. We never understand fully why the man wants to kill himself. After several unsuccessful attempts at suicide (the last one featuring a wonderful 360 degree helicopter shot on the peak of a mountain), the man finds solace in helping Ascen (her name short for Ascension, which she says is short for Christ ascending to heaven without any help) fend off family members who want to tear down her barn wall and transport it elsewhere.