In stark black-and-white, and showing the influence of 1940s John Huston, writer-director Francisco Vargas’s El violín, from Mexico, opens with a protracted scene of military torture: government soldiers beat and rape bound-and-gagged rural villagers. All this refers to political realities in 1970s Mexico as the government wages a campaign of terror and murder against a guerrilla insurgency seeking social justice and the civilians, long oppressed, whose interests the guerrillas represent. The opening underlit scene inside a peasant shack, with a peasant, back to the camera, tied to a chair and being brutalized by an officer between drafts on a cigarette (which one of the men under his command, crouched, holds for him!) focuses on the prisoner’s bound bare feet, squirming heels lightly touching the ground: an index of tremendous pain but also of attachment to the earth. This extraordinary shot associates the peasant prisoner with Nature and his assailant with the cruelty and barbarism, ironically, of “civilization”—hierarchy, government, officialdom. It is a dehumanizing force to which our inability to see the prisoner’s face—doubly, since it is facing forwards and the head, in any case, is outside the frame—is correlative. When the officer pistol-whips him, the prisoner falls over in the wooden chair onto the ground, and soldiers set him upright for more assaults from the officer—an almost subliminal suggestion of Christ raised up to his crucifixion. Thus his silence, as a result of the gagging, contrasts with the sound of the officer’s blows and curses as a juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane.
The rest of the film, although atmospheric, is not at the same level. The plot kicks in: an elderly villager’s attempt to smuggle ammunition past soldiers, inside his violin case, to insurgents.
But that opening!
Like this:
Like Loading...
This entry was posted on May 13, 2009 at 6:35 am and is filed under Formal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
THE VIOLIN (Francisco Vargas, 2005)
In stark black-and-white, and showing the influence of 1940s John Huston, writer-director Francisco Vargas’s El violín, from Mexico, opens with a protracted scene of military torture: government soldiers beat and rape bound-and-gagged rural villagers. All this refers to political realities in 1970s Mexico as the government wages a campaign of terror and murder against a guerrilla insurgency seeking social justice and the civilians, long oppressed, whose interests the guerrillas represent. The opening underlit scene inside a peasant shack, with a peasant, back to the camera, tied to a chair and being brutalized by an officer between drafts on a cigarette (which one of the men under his command, crouched, holds for him!) focuses on the prisoner’s bound bare feet, squirming heels lightly touching the ground: an index of tremendous pain but also of attachment to the earth. This extraordinary shot associates the peasant prisoner with Nature and his assailant with the cruelty and barbarism, ironically, of “civilization”—hierarchy, government, officialdom. It is a dehumanizing force to which our inability to see the prisoner’s face—doubly, since it is facing forwards and the head, in any case, is outside the frame—is correlative. When the officer pistol-whips him, the prisoner falls over in the wooden chair onto the ground, and soldiers set him upright for more assaults from the officer—an almost subliminal suggestion of Christ raised up to his crucifixion. Thus his silence, as a result of the gagging, contrasts with the sound of the officer’s blows and curses as a juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane.
The rest of the film, although atmospheric, is not at the same level. The plot kicks in: an elderly villager’s attempt to smuggle ammunition past soldiers, inside his violin case, to insurgents.
But that opening!
Like this:
This entry was posted on May 13, 2009 at 6:35 am and is filed under Formal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.