“ROSA DE AREIA” - João Bénard da Costa

The initial dusk or the final dawn

A film

Le temps s’en va, le temps
s’en va, ma Dame;
Las! Le temps non, mais nous
nous en allons
Pierre de Ronsard

In Berlin, February 1989, Rosa de Areia, the latest film by Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis, had its world premiere. We are already too used to these first nuptials of Portuguese films abroad for this fact to shock anyone. It should be shocking, but it isn’t. It will also not be shocking when quite some time from now (one year? two? three?) Rosa de Areia is finally distributed in Portugal, eventually, even, first in television (also the first – honor be done – to wager on the film) and only later in a movie theater. It will continue to not be shocking if the public leaves said theater to the flies. And it will be a bit shocking – but not very, a fait divers – if a learned committee – as happened with Ana – came to declare ex cathedra that the film has no quality. One day, later, I know. But I also know that in the long run we will all be dead. And only the film remains to resuscitate us.

I don’t want to be a bird of ill omen. Some (no need to invoke the Holy Name in vain) want things to happen differently, and differently they will happen. Yet some, only some, wanted the film to exist (RTP, State Secretariat of Culture, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) and the film exists. But, to be completely sincere, I don’t believe, I don’t believe that it will go beyond that, nor that the film will be received, in Portugal, in the diverse way that Jaime, Trás-os-Montes, Ana, Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis’ three sublime previous films, were.

Only they do not accompany me in this pessimism. The great visionaries can have doubts, can have many nights of agony, but their faith moves mountains. And it is already very dissonant for me to have started this text with so much pessimism. Therefore, I do not return to it. Because I will speak to you about one of the great founding and fundamental works that the cinema has ever given to us. Before it, we believe that everything can still be at the beginning, this beginning from which António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro are speaking to us.

Picking up from Ronsard’s epigraph, only we go on. Not time, not time, my lady.

Saying “thou” to the universe

Therefore, in Rosa de Areia, time can be none (rigorously undefined as happens in so many shots), it can be the Middle Ages, the 15th century, the 16th century, or it can be a future time, the time that Carl Sagan talks to us about in another shot of the film. Therefore, the term shot is also poor and particularly unfit. Saying sequence shot (and, in fact, the film is the sum and summary of 97 shots that are usually called that) doesn’t help me, nor does it help in understanding the prodigious construction of the film. Because there is no difference of significance and meaning, between a seconds-long shot of an undulating cereal field, or of a sometimes pacified field of flowers, and a sequence of four or five minutes that narrates a story: the pig executed under a Mosaic prescription; the account of the immolation by fire of hundreds of starving peasants; the story of the father who resuscitated from the dead to give his daughter to drink a wine made of sun, of dust and of rain.

Precisely after the episode of the pig’s execution, precisely after the shot that follows it – the most erotic and cryptic of the film – where we see the executioners, bare-chested, masses of ripped muscles in a Cottafavian revisit of the Italian peplum, washing themselves from the blood of the animal, precisely after, I was saying, we again see the Parcae who have led us in this pilgrimage since the beginning. They are next to boulders and mounts, like protrusions of them, and recite a Vedic text that asks us where the half-moons go, where the virgins of different faces rush to, because the waters never stop, because the wind never rests, because the spirit never rests. What obscure relationship exists between the previous episode and this shot (and I have already explained how badly I use these terms)? It can be answered that there exists a poetic relationship, as one can call the whole film a cinematographic poem. But the word or the expression only isn’t reductive if we understand it etymologically (in the sense of poiesis) and forget any connotation with the Pasolinian definitions of “cinema-poetry”. There is no cinema more direct, less subjective (even if one thinks about Pasolini’s “free subjectivity”) than the cinema of Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis. Never do the authors penetrate the soul of their characters (if there are characters and if they have a soul) by adopting their psychology or their language, to continue following the theory of the author of Teorema.

This penetration, even between them, seems impossible. At the end, a voice-over asks or suggests that “it is necessary, perhaps, to choose a thread, at random”. It obtains as an answer (or as continuity) that “the idea of these stories is yours, and I am not the one who will interfere with them”. And the last words of the film, next to the naked earth that had also been (from the screen of the wall) its initial image, say “and, yet, was there, ever, anything, somewhere, in some time?”.

Who is the “you” to which “the idea of these stories” is attributed? Who is the “I” that won’t interfere with them?

As Bachelard wrote one day (in the preface to the French translation of Ich und Du, by Martin Buber), the question is irrelevant when it transcends the substantialism of the first personal pronoun: “What do flowers and trees matter, and fire and stones, if I am without love and without a home? We must be two – or, at least, alas, have been two – in order to comprehend a blue sky, to invoke a sunrise. Infinite things, such as sky, forest and light find their names only in a loving heart. The breeze of plains, in its sweetness and its gentleness, is the echo of a tender sigh. Thus, the human soul, enriched with a chosen love, vivifies great things before little ones. And it can say thou to the universe, because it knows the human exaltation of the thou”.

This text of Bachelard’s is, peradventure, the best originating explanation of Rosa de Areia and of the singularity, innocent and perverse, of its gaze. Many excerpts from L’Air et les Songes could have also been cited. Because this is a film “that says thou to the universe”, a film about air and dreams, flowers and trees, fire and stone, sky and mountain, light and sound. And it is this great thing that is the cinema that enlivens in it, as much summoned by the most initial gaze as by the most crepuscular gaze, in a circle where measurable time and the time of destiny are concentric. And, in the passage from a Bachelardian terminology to a Jüngerian terminology, Rosa de Areia is also the film that reminds us that it is when the night is most dense that the dew is most fertile.

Bachelard and Jünger would have loved this Desert Rose, dawn of dusks, dusk of dawns.

An ordered rigor

I’ve said enough, I deem, for it to already be understood that Rosa de Areia, contrary to Trás-os-Montes and Ana, doesn’t have a narrative thread, at least in the conventional meaning of the term. Tenuous was this thread in the previous films, but it existed. In Trás-os-Montes, the children transported it, through their marvelous initiation into magic and rites. In Ana, the titular character transported it, this telluric grandmother for whom the vision of a comet and the call of a cow constituted the same aura of sacredness.

Rosa de Areia – despite the place that, in the film, has the same primeval and matrical landscape – Trás-os-Montes, always as the place of beginning and place of end – doesn’t follow this guided or centred structure. The only guides in the world of this film, in the time of this film, are the authors, as exposed as they are secretive to use their words. And exposed – even more exposed than in the previous films – because the ordering of the images does not obey any logic other than that of their own imagination, never so assumed and so dazzling as it is here. Secretive – even more secretive than in the previous films – because no messenger introduces himself between them and the message that each shot is. In the initial shots we deem to have found him, whether in the watchman of the children’s sleep, (the one who reads an obscure text of Kafka’s that speaks of “a little comedy”, of “an innocent illusion”) or in the blind girl that a tracking shot accompanies, between cereal fields and winds, parallel to the camera, in the depth of field, until it then turns to her – and to us – from a distant shot to a close-up.

Many times or sometimes we again meet these characters, if it is legitimate to call them that, but they’re no more conductors than all the others that we will go on to meet throughout the film. They, like everyone else, are reliefs of a dream, temporary oueds where the desert rose is born, to cite a phrase from the extremely brief synopsis of the film. Their mission – if they have a mission – is only that of presiding over the conformation of this flower, that of waking or lulling us to its ephemeral fragrance. Who are they? We don’t know, but we accompany them.

In the same way, the musical theme that we hear during the opening credits, the Symphonic Variations by César Franck, is no guide. After them, never again will we hear music in the film and they do not even foreshadow a structure to which the form “variations” can be applied. In a film of so many themes, it isn’t possible to “vary”, but only to proceed, getting denser. Therefore, later, there is only room for the sounds and the silences – sonic images as relevant as visual images – in the most well-worked soundtrack of any of Cordeiro and Reis’ films (and who has seen Trás-os-Montes and Ana already knows the importance that the authors have given it in these films).

In two sequences, we again hear something that can conventionally be called music. They are the sequences in which a woman appears, dressed all in black with a boomerang, and then with a drum associated to the shot in which past wars, past violence, paroxysms and excesses are referenced. Like the ghost of a war chief, or of the “isolated soldier” referred to not long before, in the dialogue, this woman – that we have never seen before and will never see again – seems to simultaneously wed and lament this violence, remaining in the film as its sharpest note. With her, the soundtrack explodes, in percussion or in hissing, in rhythms that, once more, can be both originating and forerunners of future dissonances.

Could it be by chance that this sequence – the most musical – is the most violent?

Could it be by chance that it is followed by the shot in which one of the authors – António Reis – appears in the film with his back turned to command the return of the ailing soul? (“Come, wandering soul! (...) Come with me, soul! To your home! Sheltered from the storms, the winds and the dark night!”).

I don’t believe so. The freest associations of the film never seem commanded by coincidences and no automatic writing can be invoked regarding this film, where the most occult ordering is the most rigorous.

With God before one’s eyes

It is, on the contrary, a powerful rhyme that unifies the episodes that follow one another between the extremely beautiful elven shot of the girls running in the clearing of the woods (a shot that strongly recalls another similar one that exists in Ana and with the same function) and the episode of the resurrection of the dead. It is the most violent and boorish “section” of the film, ever since we abandoned a Corot-like imagery (this shot that I called elven) and the extremely discreet murmurs (jingles, cowbells, gusts, breeze) of the descent from the fraga that echoes the one from Trás-os-Montes, and entered the caves and the occult.

On the top of a mount, the wind is extremely strong, much more unforgiving in its shrillness than the fluttering bodies that begin to evoke the war that they seem to see, but of which we are only given this offscreen sound. Later, the noises become more mysterious, one would say “scraping” at the image itself, as if the discourse of horror were more of sounds than of words. An immense tracking shot throws us to the bottom of a pit in a surreal imagery, until one of the most fabulous shots of the film in which the camera immobilizes itself before a black and blind dog that seems ripped from the most tenebrous Baroque bestiary, from Dionisio Minaggio and from the unusual gardens of the Spanish governors of 16th century Milan.

To this hallucinatory image (which evokes equally to me the shot of the fox in A Caça, by Manoel de Oliveira) follows the one of the well with yellow water, which slowly rises and overflows in a more mysteriously horrible analogy. And it is then that the sequences of the boomerang, of António Reis’ invocation and of the return of the ailing soul (another occult thread to Ana) with its superb composition of the image (the mirror, the body of the young man), follow one another.

And, preceded by the beat of the drum of the same woman in black, we enter into the episode that will certainly give the most to talk about: the reading of the proceedings and sentence of the homicidal pig, in the Town of Castelo Branco, in March 1428.

Contrary to the war (depicted in the soundtrack, like I said), contrary to the posterior “episode” of the bread distributor (teller of what we only glimpse along the way) the trial of the pig is entirely depicted, with characters dressed in period costume and a reconstitution of the gallows. And if the sounded or narrated (the violence of the deaths) horror functioned by ellipsis, here it functions by visualization, a “living picture”, in the very Kafkaesque monstrosity of the trial and fact (from truthful to historical). A monstrosity that reaches paroxysm when the judge affirms that, in compliance with precepts legal and theological (based on a passage from the book of Exodus), he intended capital punishment to the pig, “looking into the eyes of the criminal animal” and with “God before our eyes” condemns the “culprit” to be “hanged in potency until dead” and “there it will stay for a long time, until it rots, to the memory of the enormity of its crime and to incite reflection on others who might want to imitate him”.

The realism of the sequence vertiginously introduces the unrealism of vision and the derision of a justice that seeks, for the animal, to justify itself with the same fundaments that it uses for humans. Abstaining themselves from any excess (we don’t see the pig dying) António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro understood that only this visualization (by its unusual, absurd weight) could serve as correlate to the violence not visualized, which to our eyes – contrary to that – would already be banal due to the quotidian invasion of similar images.

What justifies this vision is its difference of nature and of object. Being the same, the horror is diverse and hence the circularity of these various “episodes” lacking in “nourishment, human aid and life”.

For this reason too, these slaughters cannot stay confined to a remote past. The yellow spot that the girl later traces on the ground, able to be associated with that of the water of the well, refers back to another circle in which historical time unites with that of science fiction. The circle of images is as perfect as that of sounds. And the words are like the passing wind.

Everything is image. Everything is a fragment. Everything is one.

Space, hunting, homeland

In the fourth of the Duino Elegies, Rilke speaks of a mysterious “promise”. The lovers, he says, promise each other Weit, Jagd und Heimat (Space, Hunting and Homeland). Those who come together for love situate themselves in the Weite, the space, or, more precisely, the “vast”. It’s in this widened, dilated, open space that the “hunting” will take place. The Heimat, the homeland, the place of return, is the third moment of the “promise”, but this moment is not situated in time. As Rilke says, it is not “one of the seasons of our secret year”. The “homeland” is, more approximately, the abolition of time and its resorption into a new space which the Tenth Elegy calls

Stelle, Siedelung, Lager,
Boden, Wohnort (Place,
Settlement, Camp,
Land, Dwelling)

It is a similar promise that seems to me to announce and enunciate itself in Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis’ Rosa da Areia.

I have already referred to the mystery of the “I” and the “you” in the final dialogue, which suggests a two-faced gaze, a loving duality.

This duality, this gaze begins by resting itself on the space of Trás-os-Montes, an already mythological space in the films of the two authors, by reference that from Trás-os-Montes and Ana those films bind with this one in what is much more than a décor. Rosa de Areia does not begin in Trás-os-Montes, but the initial naked wall (the “wall of time” to return to the Jüngerian lexicon) only unveils itself to lead us to look at children “deeply immersed into the night” whom the voice of the poet does not awaken, but seems to introduce to similar dreams as those of the children in Trás-os-Montes and Ana (especially to the dream of the sick boy in Ana, watched over by his grandmother).

Right after, this space, extremely free and unfettered, affirms itself, the unmistakable space of previous films and previous apparitions. This space is, too, the space of montage, such as was understood by the Russian filmmakers with whom, since Jaime, António Reis has secret and elective affinities: Dovzhenko, Tarkovsky, Parajanov. A very imprudent gaze could say that in Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis, as in the cited filmmakers, there is no montage, in the rhetorical sense of the term. But there are no films more millimetrically edited, no films where the montage is so breathy, no films where montage and space confound each other in such an absolute and totalizing way.

One needs only to look with attention to that prodigious beginning, from the Dovzhenkian cereal field, to the tracking shot of the blind girl; from the first appearance of the immense granitic mass (the wind, the wind) to the visitation of the androgynous angel with yellow trousers that the blind girl will accompany, from the shot of the potato picking to that of gorse and of the constitution of the germinal group.

What does the angel propose to the blind girl and, later, to the other apparitions? In the Rilkean sense, a hunt or an act of hunting (Jagd) in which the imagination is not a play of images (visual and sonic) but the very substance of the world, that world which they address as “thou”, with fear and astonishment.

Making it explicit is the episode of the church (“ancestral, extremely silent and empty” like in Cristóvão Pavia’s poem), making it explicit is the association (done through dialogue) to the insensibility to beauty, the coldness to compassion. And making it explicit, above all, is the magnificent staging of Montaigne’s text, again entrusted to the initial watchman. At the beginning, he moves as if he were in an aquarium, in a liquid element, until the camera moves back and we discover the audience to which he is addressing himself. The aquarium turns into a stage or canvas and the cinema is expressly summoned (film within the film) to this hunt for images, placed under the sign of the fox.

Hunting, beyond poetry, in a world of amère beauté, or in Rilke’s strongest imagery, of “the first degree of the terrible”. And it is towards an ascension in this beauty and this terribleness that we are driven in the episode that I have evoked above, before this “wind full of worldspace” also referred to in the Elegies. Its last step is the resurrection of the dead (“too late”) father and the prettiest zen text of the man pursued by a tiger who fell into a hole where another tiger was waiting for him.

It is after this narration, culminating the mise-en-scène developed throughout what I called “the hunt”, with a plastic dominion and tension from which only, eventually, the “sequence” of the beating in the church (the only one in the film that arouses reservations in me) escapes, that reference is made to the “initial dusk of history” in what is, for me, the most visually impressive movement of the whole film. It is when “the extreme beauty of these fragile bodies”, before the end of the night, emerges in the first nude of Cordeiro and Reis’ films and in the movement of the child who opens the door and becomes lost in the night. It is a Magrittean composition which culminates that reign of the mise-en-scène and the cycle of the surreal.

Saint-John Perse then comes to call us, in other words, to cette terre jaune, notre délice, to the return to the homeland, that is, to the dwellings. And the film then acquires its plainly cosmic dimension, in which this earth and this beauty are only one place between billions, billions, billions.

The angel returns, the telluric imagery returns, while the atomic mushroom explodes and the landscape seems to liquefy itself, as carnal and as abstract as in Monet’s Nymphéas. Yellow gives way to rose and I and you dissolve into the “same person… the same image, perhaps…”.

From the “initial dusk of history” we return to the “final dawn”, closing the circle that is the most contrasting of the metaphors used in the film. From its depths shoots the water of various colors that unites the terrible springs to the springs of harmony, the bloody dusks to the pacified dusks.

Rosa de Areia is a perfect figure, carrying the magic symbolism of all the perfect forms. In cinema, it is the most beautiful version of the Hindu text of Matsya Purana that Malraux evoked in the introduction to La Metamorphose des Dieux. “‘The return to reality’ always forms part of a cycle of appearances in which the intimation of the incommunicable sacred can only prolong the flood”.

António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro dared to whisper it in the film in which the cinema reveals what separates the vision of appearance from appearance itself. From it, they wove the most inextricable threads, knowing that the tapestry will remain, like Penelope’s, forever unfinished, because in it, at once, “all forms are drawn and erased”.

END