His life for the documentary

In El Salvador, more than 14.000 young people profess strong devotion to criminal gangs that replace what would be their natural family. In them, violence is more than their regular environment; it’s eminently what vertebrates their daily life. Since their childhood, these people living among poverty conditions were taught that survival was only possible by committing crimes such as theft, extortion, arms sell, drugs traffic or kidnapping. In spite of the crudity of all these events the members of the gang keep on acting like this. They don’t know another kind of life, they got used to pain, to crime as a way of subsistence.

Most of these bands were created in the eighties. The inhabitants of El Salvador had to escape from the civil war and found shelter in the ghettos of Los Angeles. The bands were created there, and they got stronger when the refugees and illegal immigrants were deported back to Centre America. Nowadays the bands are transnational -El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala-, and are defined by different kind of visual codes -clothes, tattoos-, including a specific sign language for each band. Some of them are faced one to each other: that’s the case of Mara 18 and Mara Salvatrucha.

Seven years ago, the Hispanic-French photographer and filmmaker Christian Poveda spent 16 months among ‘Mara 18’. He convinced them to let their voice be heard so as to stop being stigmatized. Poveda got a documentary that brings us in the situation of these young people running their own bakery, which becomes a symbol of hope in a hostile surrounding. Poveda really approached to the core of their life: in the documentary we can see extremely though and intimate moments of the protagonists, like arguments or bawls after the death of members of the gang. 

In fact, the filmmaker went so deep that had to pay the experience with his own life: a year after the official release of the documentary he was murdered by 4 members of the gang. It’s not clear if they killed him because they felt too exposed or because after those months Poveda had enough information to be considered ‘dangerous’. Anyway, Mara 18 killed the wrong person. Poveda was definitely trying to help them -as we can see, the documentary shows the human face of this people-. He fought to reconcile Mara 18 and Mara Salvatrucha, perhaps even more than any official institution has ever done. His body was found inert in the street, as many others had been found, as many others will be found, as long as they don’t come out of this hole. 

Good Glasses

Our senses are very limited. The world’s problems nowadays go beyond our gaze. As much as the news bombs us with detailed information, we are incapable to understand the dimension of actual problems through the words. Even the documentaries images are made from the earth, and that means that they focus in a particular point of view of the conflicts we try to understand. Too small: we won’t be able to understand the problems, because our problems are worldwide problems. So, combining this limited vision with the ambiguity of words, it’s very complicated to explain and understand the problems around us.

Our vision is, basically, reduced to our most immediate environment. We can’t have global perspective of wars, demographic or climatic problems… even if we are capable of conceptually assimilate them. We need new glasses that must allow us to approach to the world: not with the generalist frivolity, but to push out into in its total. The documentary Home is nearly composed of aerial shots of multiple places all over the world. The images are filmed 100 meters above the ground and it shows the ecological assortment of life on the planet and how humanity has became a threat for the balance of the planet. The film’s essence lies in showing the images from a unlimited point of view, without filters, so they become into ideas autonomous enough. It’s a film with a powerful educational propose, perfectly understandable for adult and child audiences.

This film has been filmed for eighteen months: the shooting team, with the director Yann Arthus-Bertrand as the leader, have flied above more than fifty countries on a helicopter. The result is a complete puzzle of our world: an amazing shot panorama of the world we live in and the damage we’re doing to it with our modern ways of consume. "Everybody can prosper and earn a decent living... Let's be responsible consumers; think about what we buy..." The documentary includes a voiceover narration which explains the evolution of the Earth, its nature, agriculture, humanity and all the disasters we cause: natural habitats destruction, energy depletion, climate disruption… There are a lot of global issues that must be understood and resolved. In fact, this film explains us the most important of these problems and the necessity of acting fast and together to resolve them.

When classical music stops being classical

In a way, we could say classical music has always been connected to the social elites, inasmuch as it’s them who have had power, money and namely leisure time to accurately cultivate themselves in disciplines that are not directly connected with survival, such as literature or painting. Maybe that’s the reason why still today the words ‘classical music’ could inspire a certain feeling of intricacy, boredom or demureness.

But that argument is not valid anymore. Maybe the only advantage of living in a mass society is the fact that we have enough technological resources and a portion of free time that allow us to venture in this bad supposedly inaccessible world of classical music.

Aware of that, some well-known figures of the classical music world are nowadays trying to deny that premise. In the audiovisual field, we especially acclaim the task done in 1996 by the British conductor Sir Simon Denis Rattle, who wrote and presented ‘Leaving Home’, a seven episode arts documentary awarded with a British Academy of Film and Television Award (BAFTA) for Best Arts Programme.

In each of the seven episodes, Rattle conducts the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and combines the chief musical developments of the 20^th century that it is playing with explanations about the historical background and suggesing images. Only knowing about the politically and socially convulse context of the 20^th century can the viewer understand why and how this ‘odd’ music came out.

In fact, the adjective ‘classical’ is almost opposite to the message that ‘Leaving Home’ wants to transmit. The ‘standard’ classical music of the 18^th and 19^th centuries (Mozart, Hadyn, Beethoven) is actually the vanishing point for the music composed in the last century or, at least, the basis from which these last composers depart. Rhythm, melody, texture and dynamics were almost forced to change in a world that was also creating new running patterns. The music from the last century is perhaps a way to understand the turning point of the 20^th century history or, at least, one of the best things it has brought.   

Marina Hernández

A history of human culture

Once upon a time 30.000 years ago, there were some human in a cave of southern France, who devoted their time to art. The documentary Cave of forgotten dreams captures the more ancient creation of humanity housed in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave. The really profound essence of the pictures lies in the perception, because this art transcends the visual. The director Werner Herzog highlights the importance of sensorial implications to sense the aura of the energetic, mobile and audible paintings of Chauvert’s cave. The documentary becomes a travel to the Palaeolithic’s art nature. After all, the cave turns to time capsule with which it is possible to communicate.   

Since Chauvet’s discovery in 1994, the entrance has been constrained to preserve integral the paintings away from overexposure. Herzog gains exclusive permission to film inside the cave, which can be arising as a gap between two irreconcilable imaginaries. However, the director suggests a variety of parallelisms between the cave’s representations and the contemporaries. In this way, the cave walls are almost like a form of proto-cinema: when the light is projected on the images generates the animation of the paintings and consequently it creates the sensation of movement.

The paintings are stirred and acquire a different life. Besides, the image of Fred Astaire dancing with his shadow establishes an extravagantly communicative bridge between Hollywood dances and the images of the cave. The past-present relationship is terminated because of these pictorial images such remote emerges a sense of familiarity.

Hergoz found this cave as the dawn of human intelligence and sensitivity. The documentary enhances the artistic value and, above all, the beauty of the paintings, driving-related prejudices primitivism. Jean Clottes, one of the scientists studying the cave, explains that the concept “homo sapiens” (“men who know”) is inadequate to describe the human species and he considers the most successful concept “homo spiritualis” (“spiritual being”).

Even on the premise that a reconstruction of the past is impossible, the goal of Cave of forgotten dreams is to delve into the stories of the past. The imagination is the mechanism for this retrocession: through the sensations transmitted by the cave, historical scenes can be reconstructed. The art is a language par excellence emotionally able to tell what happened. And the virtue of art is that leaves a room for the imagination in which we can incorporate our baggage and interpretations. So, although the exact content of the cave could have been disappeared as its members, it still remains the capacity to speculate on the meaning of the paintings. And this, finally, helps in recovering the quintessence of this space.

Inhabiting the inhospitable

Ask yourself what proportion of time in your life have you been walking on asphalt and what proportion of time have you been treading a green or sandy ground. If you think you’ve spent more time walking on asphalt, you should probably watch Human Planet.

Announced in 2007 and first released on TV last 2011, this 8-part television documentary series was produced by the BBC with co-production from Discovery and BBC Worldwide. It won 2 BAFTA Television Craft awards among 7 nominations.

Human Planet basically shows how still today some people are really connected to nature conditions to survive. To demonstrate that, the production teams based at the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol and BBC Wales recorded 70 stories around inhospitable lands of 40 countries in which humans still inhabit.

All the material was divided following a criterion of environment type. That means each of the eight chapters are recorded in different places on Earth, but the life of people living in those locations depends extremely on one of these topics: oceans, deserts, arctic, jungles, mountains, grasslands, rivers and cities. You might be surprised there’s a ‘cities’ episode: its function is to create a contrast with the seven chapters that precede it.

The stunning quality of the recording, accompanied by the photography work of Timothy Allen, is not all the impression that remains after watching them. The series has an anthropological message that makes you wonder not only why do these group of people still exist and why nature is inherent to their habits and culture, but also why we are not that connected to nature anymore, why our current society mistreats, ignores and overexploits it the way it does, if the basic vital functions of any human in the planet depend on it, and that includes us.

Marina Hernández 

Hopefully!

According to Greek legend, Pandora is the first woman on earth. The legend says that she receives a present from the gods and she was told never to open. Incited by her curiosity, Pandora opened it and all evil contained in the box spread over the earth. There was one thing that lay at the bottom: hope. Although it took time to scientists to accept that human beings come from Africa, we all know that it is humanity’s origin. If I were to locate Pandora’s box in somewhere on earth, I will definitely chose Africa. Because hope and  the beginning are actually there.

From savannas to dense forest, all landscapes of Africa are full of rich diversity. Africa is the habitat to many singular species and there is a curious relation to discover between animals and vegetation. Absolutely, in this place there are wildlife vestiges and the remains of human nature. Africa - Eye to eye with the unknown is a new David Attenborough’s series (2013) filmed over four years around the entire continent. The documentary is a travel to places like the mysterious circles in the Kalahari, giant-gentle giraffes fights, monkeys and snakes inhabit in the dark, the African micro-world and the maternity of shoebills in Zambia. Besides, Attenborough comes face-to-face with a baby rhino along this adventure.

The series are rather an exploration of multiplicity African experience. From the Atlas Mountains to the Cape of Good Hope, Kalahari and Namib deserts and from the jungles of the Congo to Atlantic Ocean. All of these film aims to strike a balance between what people know and what people ignore about a significant part of Africa’s history and stories. Despite of the connection that is obviously linking the whole world, there is a worrying disengagement of knowledge about Africa. Related to this, the final programme is about environmental problems affecting Africa’s natural world and it also demonstrates the work of conservationists across the continent.    

Africa is a clearly concern about the current circumstances of the country and, finally, about the conflict between civilization and wildlife all over the world. However, the film is above all a combination of human life’s origin and hope: along the animal populations emerges the assortment of freedom and wild that Africa is full of.  

99 minutes of silence

We would surely agree on the fact that communication does not strictly depend on words -in fact the Scientifics assure that only the 10% of it consists on verbal language. However, I bet you would not be that convinced that it is possible to find a strong message in a 99 minutes documentary film in which no one says a single word. But it actually is.

Samsara is a no narrative documentary directed by Ron Fricke and produced by Mark Magidson. It was first premiered last 2011 at the Toronto International Film Festival. It took Fricke and Magidson five years time to travel over 25 countries around the world and film suggestive landscapes, rituals, people and places of our present time. It actually has a connection with the title of the work: the Sanskrit word ‘samsara’ means ‘world’ or ‘cyclic existence’, but it is often used to describe worldwide activities.

The official website of the film describes it more accurately: “Expanding on the themes they developed in Baraka (1992) and Chronos (1985), Samsara explores the wonders of our world from the mundane to the miraculous, looking into the unfathomable reaches of man’s spirituality and the human experience. Neither a traditional documentary nor a travelogue, Samsara takes the form of a nonverbal, guided meditation”. Indeed, that is literally reading an image.

A thousand workers chain, buddhist monks, a dump, a Hindu dancer, the fake islands in Dubai, an abandoned house, the subway, street dancers. They all seem random motifs, but the more you enter in it the more you start to find an order. It is actually the viewers who end up improvising a script with their own thoughts that fight with the silence so as to create a personal message.

Some will say it’s not easy to watch, and they might have their comprehensible reasons. Certainly, entertaining, playful or funny would not be the words to describe it. The slow rhythm, combined with the ethereal music by Michael Stearns, Lisa Gerrard and Marcello de Francisci, occasionally create a perturbing feeling. But after watching it you will consider that sometimes active uneasiness can be more worthy than passive amusement.

Marina Hernández