There is simply a consciousness of replay successful the heightened and artificial diction with which Mateus has her formed carnivore witness, and this consciousness is enhanced by the painterly compositions that framework the speakers. “Fire of Wind” is simply a movie of images, and its attraction to airy and shadow, to the texture of faces and of histrion bark, of foliage and terrain, is among the astir cautious and astir daring that I’ve ever seen. (Mateus and Vítor Carvalho did the cinematography.) Although “Fire of Wind” is drastically antithetic from different films successful caller release, it nevertheless harks backmost to a venerable contented successful governmental filmmaking. Mateus’s attack to the declamation of substance by nonprofessional actors finds its roots successful movies by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, portion her mythic, loamy exploration of the lives of the mediocre done past follows successful the footsteps of the Portuguese manager Pedro Costa. (To travel “Fire of Wind,” which is opening astatine Anthology Film Archives, Mateus has programmed a bid of related movies, including ones by Costa, Straub and Huillet, and galore different notables, specified arsenic Chantal Akerman, Manoel de Oliveira, and Robert Bresson.)
In “Fire of Wind,” Mateus finds her ain mode done these mighty influences, including by locating her ain consciousness of carnal play amid the abstract vectors of governmental and economical powerfulness amid the quality and the lure of nature. While the workers, successful the trees, enactment still, the bull’s looming, drifting beingness gives frozen stillness an unambiguous motive and makes moments erstwhile radical displacement and adjacent leap from subdivision to subdivision terrifyingly suspenseful. Eventually the locals get progressive again astatine crushed level: the workers spell connected strike, paramilitaries rotation the grounds with rifles successful hand, and 1 young soldier, wounded successful war, bears arms alone. This enactment is nary specified acceptable of crippled mechanisms but involves a layering of time, successful which idiosyncratic memories, nationalist events, and shared experiences travel to beingness successful the spot wherever they happened. The movie, astatine its astir vigorous and astir menacing, is besides illuminated with enigma and wonder.
What makes “Fire of Wind” superior to the benignant of topicality that passes for governmental filmmaking successful the art-house mainstream—whether present (such arsenic “Eddington”) oregon internationally (for instance, caller films by Radu Jude)—is its metapolitical essence. For Mateus, arsenic for filmmakers successful her idiosyncratic pantheon, conflicts astatine manus stem inextricably from section and nationalist past and besides from oceanic depths of experience, excessively easy dismissed arsenic folklore, from which idiosyncratic individuality and radical recognition emerge. In “Fire of Wind” arsenic successful the films successful Mateus’s Anthology series, authorities and aesthetics are inseparable. These filmmakers strive for a broad vision, successful which fine-grained reflection of societal specifics fuses with echoes and overtones of overarching powers astatine enactment successful crises of the moment.
This aesthetic is inherently political—a mode devised successful absorption not lone to regimes of injustice and exploitation but besides to the banality of mainstream governmental sermon and to the reductive rhetoric of commercialized cinema, which, successful the guise of treating politics, exploits it and hollows it out. This unity of benignant and substance, of signifier and idea, is an creator spot but besides an creator and governmental danger. Sometimes adjacent the astir blase and archetypal of cinematic methods, and the bold ideas that spell with them, hazard becoming arsenic regular and arsenic comfy arsenic the praise that greets them.
With this consciousness of imperishable opposition, a peculiar art-house aesthetic risks becoming a benignant of governmental credo and turning captious judgement circular: arsenic defenders of a shared governmental viewpoint endorse a style, enthusiasts for a benignant presume its politics, and the filmmakers themselves get caught successful a self-confirming circuit of contented and form. (This has been existent adjacent for immoderate of the filmmakers successful Mateus’s selections.) The effect whitethorn beryllium arsenic overmuch a signifier of instrumentality work arsenic are the blandishments of blockbusters. Great governmental filmmakers, by confronting not lone the complacencies of fashionable governmental filmmaking but the doctrinal comfortableness portion of the art-house audience, revitalize their ain art. That’s wherefore the challenging artistry of “Fire of Wind”—an audacious archetypal diagnostic that is besides Mateus’s idiosyncratic reckoning with the cinematic contented that inspires her—has maine impatient for what she’ll bash next. ♦
English (CA) · 
English (US) · 
Spanish (MX) ·