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Lisandro Alonso's "Los Muertos"
"That's How a Man Lives"
By Andy Rector

The words "and that's all" concluded one festival synopsis of Lisandro Alonso's first film La Libertad . The synopsis wasn't meant as a criticism, it was simply too difficult to recount the phenomena of this film of a woodcutter where there's no back-story or psychology and every daily action is under a microscope.

"Los muertos"

Alonso's second feature Los Muertos is even stronger and as confounding as La Libertad. When Alonso spoke after the Viennale screening he used the words "I don't know" and "observe" a lot. The cinema can only benefit from this, Alonso proves. He is observing people in a new way, outside of capital (without a single insert shot) in solitude. Alonso appears to be a director of loneliness.

Shot in the Corrientes province of Argentina, seven hours north of Buenos Aires, Los Muertos has a similar geography and form as La Libertad: a male main character who is in every shot in blunt truthful long durations, living as he does, off the land. The major difference in Los Muertos being the addition of fiction: 54 year old Vargas, in prison for murder, is released and on a land to river journey to see his daughter. This addition of fiction expands the film's scope and implications beyond La Libertad as a view of the size, life and violence of humanity.

People are dwarfed by trees and vegetation (as buildings dwarf people in the city). They are dwarfed by the curve of the earth seen in a pan over a river. They are dwarfed by the duration of simple actions. Alonso's film makes the size of the figures and events reverberate. Vargas is all different sizes in the frame — and in the world when he's dropped of by the police from prison, breaking off honeycomb and sucking on it for nourishment, or rowing himself across a green river. In the diorama-like final shot, humanity is dwarfed to science-fiction proportions.

When out of prison people can traverse huge spaces, hunt and kill or gather their own food. Out of prison Vargas does this, in prison (a shockingly minimum security prison compared to the high tech isolation cell blocks I know of in the States) he eats out of Tupperware, washes and sits. Even in prison Los Muertos is a positive film. In the workshop another inmate says to Vargas as he works on a wooden chair: "We have plenty of time to work here... we could do good work". Most of the encounters with other humans in the film, excepting Vargas's visit to a prostitute, result in a stated possibility, hope or affirmation. "There's a lot of ways to cut hair," says the barber. People seem to be waiting for each other just so that they can offer them something: knowledge, a drink, hospitality.

Not to be idyllic about the place, after all there is murder and pain. The woods are constantly brooding for the viewer. For Alonso's people this brooding doesn't seem to exist.

After seeing Los Muertos I went over to John Ford's Iron Horse. As in many Fords there is a landowner character who corrupts everything. It made me wonder if Vargas, his daughter or her son would ever have to pay rent or move because of private property or "progress". The world is brooding!

Andy Rector
© FIPRESCI, Viennale, 2004

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