During a certain scene Eureka We hear a character say that Time, unlike space, is a human invention. A fiction. It is a scene that is surprising not so much for the fact that the dialogue is set up with a conventional shot-reverse shot—a rarity in the cinema of Lisandro Alonso until this last film—as if because the Argentine director wanted to make it so easy for him to decipher his objectives. With this suggestive declamation Alonso complements the brief explanations that he has given about his way of filming—he always works depending on the locations with which he has come across, designing the plot or whatever is derived from them—, since it confirms the ideas with which we have wanted to theorize him, both in terms of his character and representative of post-narrative cinema or even of slow cinema.
Precisely in a book that tried to approach slow cinema, titled How long does a movie last?it was where Horacio Muñoz Fernández He drew a panoramic view of Alonso. “What these types of filmmakers demonstrate is that beyond the stories there are spaces of meaning, visuality, temporality, and gestures, which only appear when the image of cinema emerges from the weight of the narrative”. The narrative requires a specific time to develop, according to conditions that human beings have created according to what was found on the ground in the first place. That what is authentically real and solid is therefore space, the earth—and fiction turns out to be just a human invention through which to negotiate—, is not an exclusive occurrence of Alonso. In fact, it becomes the seminal idea of western.
Alonso does not usually recognize cinephile references, but he has remained so faithful to this core of thought that as his career progressed the link with the western It has become narrower and narrower. At the same time that his dramatic approaches continued to be minimal, the space with which he worked was expanding, and he fought for his cinema to be permeated by the artifices of fiction. This is confirmed Eureka —which could be described as his most accessible film at the same time the most complex and, of course, the most ambitious—although his investigations into the cinematographic medium itself through meta-referential strategies may refer us to the third film he directed, Ghost. In Ghost the two leading actors of his previous films, Freedom and The deadthey crossed paths in a Buenos Aires cinema where, precisely, The dead.
So we go to Viggo Mortensenprotagonist of Jauja —apparent jump from Alonso to more “commercial” leagues in 2014—, and also the protagonist of one of the three segments, or vectorscomprising Eureka. As an actor Mortensen has a particular aura, something like cowboy without Borderswhich is not limited to riding through the comfortable territory of the American latitudes – as it did in the recent Until the end of the world— but dares to venture into other environments, from Arabia to oceans of fire to Middle Earth in The Lord of the rings. He is an autonomous rider, who manipulates the iconography at will, and that is why both in Jauja like in Eureka plays two desperate men searching for their daughter, blurring the tragic figure of the John Wayne desert centaurs: in Jauja He was a pompous Danish military man, Eureka a dirty gunman whose location in a western absurdist goes back to dead man by Jim Jarmusch.
This vector is shot in black and white with the greatest pace at which things have ever happened in an Alonso film, and perhaps precisely for this reason it takes little time to become explicit as a fictional movie —with the four thirds evidencing the margins of the television that broadcasts it— within the space inhabited by the other characters of Eureka. Discerning what kind of space this is, and why it has interested Alonso, is the most enriching challenge of Eureka. The second part of the film is the one with the longest length and takes place on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in South Dakota. This time there is no play with the origin of the images – although the setting and the slow investigations of the police protagonist may remind us of fargo-, yes ok the dialectic between the spectacle fake Mortensen and Native American Life weave a clear figure.
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Bearing in mind the premiere of The Moon Killers and a whole tradition of westerns intoning the mea culpa Because of the genocide that led to the founding of the United States, Alonso would be treading familiar and easily celebrated terrain. He would gain weight in the presumption that Eureka is indeed more accessible, using Mortensen as hollywood trompe l’oeiland would move away from that post-narrative cinema that privileged the wandering experience on satisfied digestion. But it is just in this vector—full of magnificent moments between long waits linked— where the script warns us against the true nature of time. It does so around a trip with which the character of Sadie LaPointe She could well transcend her miseries as a Native American in the United States still condemned, after so many years, to deal with violence.
The speech of Eureka It’s not that simple, then. In order for a discourse to be articulated, in reality, a firm platform would be necessary, a temporality to address, and Alonso takes care to progressively deactivate it, as the figure of an exotic bird that guides us between vectors and spaces becomes important. we could understand Eureka as a sensory exploration around the memory of the American continent —The third vector, and the one most similar to Alonso’s first films, is set in the brazilian jungle—, with colonialism as an omnipresent specter, and perhaps we would not be wrong. But if that were the case, the feeling of wanting to structure the unstructuredto seek temporary understanding of something allergic to it.
It might be more appropriate to assume then EurekaSimply, within Alonso’s usual budgets. As another study of an expanding spacepatiently observing—behind the back of any clock or calendar—the effects of human dynamics such as greed, violence or machismo, and understanding that it was precisely in the intersection of these dynamics where time and fiction were born. In its most lucid elements Eureka it does nothing other than let us see the infrastructure that was underneath everything. And he wonders, simultaneously, if different things could be built from here.
