There is a sense of repetition in the exaggerated and artificial diction with which Matheus forces his actors to testify, and this feeling is enhanced by the pictorial compositions that frame the speakers. Fire in the Wind is a film of images, and its attention to light and shadow, the texture of faces and tree bark, foliage and terrain is one of the most careful and boldest I've ever seen. (The cinematographers were Mateus and Vitor Carvalho.) While Windfire is radically different from other films of late, it nonetheless harkens back to a venerable tradition of political filmmaking. Mateusz's approach to the recitation of text by non-professional actors has its roots in the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet, and her mythical, loamy exploration of the lives of the poor throughout history follows in the footsteps of Portuguese director Pedro Costa. (Accompanied by Fire of the Wind, which opens in the Anthology Film Archive, Matheus programmed series of similar filmsincluding works by Costa, Straub and Huillet, as well as many other celebrities such as Chantal Akerman, Manoel de Oliveira and Robert Bresson.)
In Fire of the Wind, Mateus finds his own path through these powerful influences, including situating his own sense of physical drama among abstract vectors of political and economic power amid the beauty and seduction of nature. While the tree workers remain motionless, the bull's looming, drifting presence gives the icy stillness an unambiguous motif and makes the moments when the men move and even leap from branch to branch frighteningly tense. Eventually the locals become active again at the ground level: workers go on strike, paramilitaries roam the area with rifles in their hands, and one young soldier, wounded in the war, carries a gun alone. This action is not just a set of plot mechanisms, it involves layers of time in which personal memories, social events and shared experiences come to life in the place where they occurred. This film, at its most energetic and most menacing, is also filled with mystery and wonder.
What makes Fire in the Wind more relevant than what is considered political filmmaking in the arthouse mainstream—both here (e.g., Eddington) and internationally (e.g., the recent films of Radu Jude)—is its metapolitical essence. For Matheus, as for filmmakers in her personal pantheon, conflicts spring inextricably from local and national histories, as well as from the oceanic depths of experience that are too easily dismissed as the folklore from which individual identity and group identification emerge. In Fire of the Wind, as in the films from the Matheus Anthology series, politics and aesthetics are inseparable. These filmmakers strive for a comprehensive vision that combines detailed observation of social features with echoes and subtexts of the overarching forces at work in momentary crises.
This aesthetic is inherently political, a mode created in opposition not only to regimes of injustice and exploitation, but also to the banality of mainstream political discourse and the reductive rhetoric of commercial cinema, which, under the guise of dealing with politics, exploits and devastates it. This unity of style and content, form and idea, represents an artistic strength, but also an artistic and political danger. Sometimes even the most sophisticated and original cinematic techniques and the bold ideas that accompany them risk becoming as routine and convenient as the praise with which they are met.
Given this sense of constant opposition, a certain arthouse aesthetic risks becoming a kind of political creed and turning critical judgment into a vicious circle: when advocates of a common political point of view approve of a style, enthusiasts of the style accept its politics, and the filmmakers themselves are caught in a self-validating circle of content and form. (This is true even for some of the filmmakers chosen by Matheus.) The result may be as much a form of fan service as blockbuster blandishment. Great political directors, confronting not only the complacency of popular political filmmaking but also the doctrinal comfort zone of art-house audiences, reinvigorate their own art. That's why the defiant artistry of Fire in the Wind—a bold first feature that's also Matheus' personal acknowledgment of the cinematic tradition that inspires her—has me eager to see what she does next. ♦
