At Sea

Because Leviathan made me think of ships and slow movies, here's Petter Hutton's 2007 At Sea. It's one hour long, about a ship, ostensibly a documentary and Film Comment named it the best avant-garde film of the past decade. It also has less than fifty votes at the IMDB, which is a shame. If you like contemplative cinema, amazing images or James Benning, enjoy:

The Jackal of Nahueltoro

El Chacal de Nahueltoro (English: The Jackal of Nahueltoro) is a 1970 Chilean film by Chilean director Miguel Littín. Much like Jorge Sanjinés, the Bolivian filmmaker whose The Blood of the Condor was the focus of the first entry in my YouTube Film Treasure Series, Littín is a political leftist who's made a career of films about history that often focus on the plight of the poor.



The Jackal of Nahueltoro is based on a real life murder: a man kills a woman and her children. He's apprehended, imprisoned and eventually sentenced to death and executed by firing squad. Before he dies, the government educates him ("improves" him) and gives him a shiny new pair of shoes. The irony, of course, is that nobody cared about the man before he committed murder. The government didn't want to educate him. He didn't have nice shoes. If he would have had these things, he might not have become a criminal. Giving these things to citizens chosen to die rather than those fated to live is also a waste of resources. That's the message, but it's Littín's raw, visually expressive presentation that makes the film unforgettable.

Blood of the Condor

There are a lot of great films on YouTube. Sometimes they disappear, but that's life. I still can't find my favourite scarf that I lost. Consequently and until I find that scarf here's the first entry in a series of posts I'm calling the YouTube Film Treasure Series. If I were a Soviet bureaucrat I'd call it YTFTS.

Yawar Mallku (English: Blood of the Condor) is a Bolivian feature film by Jorge Sanjinés, a Bolivian director who started making films in 1966 and has been making them ever since. He'll be 80 years old in a few years. His latest film, Insurgentes, came out in 2012 but doesn't even have an entry on the IMDB, and I've no idea how to get to copy.



Sanjinés is definitely what you'd call a "political" filmmaker. Blood of the Condor is a good example of what that means. It's set in Bolivia and concerns a member of an indigenous Andean tribe who leaves his rural mountain home and heads for the capital La Paz to get blood for a wounded family member who needs it. The city is a scary place, and despite the tribe member's best attempts he fails to get the blood or generally blend in with urban society. Although he tries to act western, none of the Spanish-speaking city people accept him as a worthwhile citizen. Meanwhile, the tribe itself is being wiped out by the American Peace Corps, which has set up a medical clinic that purports to be providing free medical services but is actually secretly sterilising the women of the tribe. When the tribe finds out, its members use the dead man who needed blood as a martyr and rise up against the imperialist Americans, leading to one of the most famous and effective freeze frame endings in film history—the tribe members lifting their guns in defiance. Although far less known, it's right up there with the last frame of Truffaut's The 400 Blows.

The copy of the film on YouTube doesn't have English subtitles, but subtitles aren't really necessary.