No way home: silence, slowness and the problem of authenticity in the cinema of Lisandro Alonso

Roberto Cavallini

doi:10.14591/aniki.v2n2.172

Abstract

In his trilogy, comprising La Libertad (2001), Los Muertos (2004) and Liverpool (2008), Argentinian director Lisandro Alonso employs a distinctive narrative motif, namely the journey of solitary individuals through desolated landscapes in rural Argentina. From a comparative view, the key to understanding these introverted trajectories is to consider Alonso’s construction of narrative space around the misery of a stark void, namely the absence of home. For Alonso, home is not a peaceful destination, connoting the intimacy of a family, serenity or simply a place where one is allowed to dream in peace (Bachelard). The absence of home becomes the blind spot of these journeys: home turns out to be a broken horizon. In this essay I will mainly focus on the film Los Muertos and the way in which it radicalizes narrative space through the combination of cinematic silence (absence of words and dialogues) and cinematic slowness (static long-takes) while formulating a void which coincides with the protagonist’s homelessness. Moreover, this essay tries to consider how Alonso’s radical cinematic realism problematizes the concept of authenticity in its modern formation, and also in the context of Rancière’s notion of documentary fiction and the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

Highlights

Lisandro Alonso’s trilogy, making use of silence and observational detachment, tells the secluded stories and trajectories of silent male characters through Argentina’s landscapes
From the point of view of cinematic realism and the integration of fiction and documentary styles, the most interesting film of the trilogy is arguably Los Muertos, whose opening is marked by an oneiric sequence which differs from the cinematic style generally employed in all three films
The opening scene of Los Muertos leads us into a lush forest through slow, floating and tilting camera movements, which create blurred images of the forest but which sometimes focuses on a small detail like a leaf or a tree trunk

Summary

Introduction

Lisandro Alonso’s trilogy, making use of silence and observational detachment, tells the secluded stories and trajectories of silent male characters through Argentina’s landscapes. I believe that Alonso primarily embraces the aesthetics of slow cinema, merging together cinematic silence and slowness, for a radical redemption of cinematic realism offering authentic modes of life that precipitate the viewer into Argentino’s silent and marginal world.

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Conclusion